Control design for highly maneuverable autonomous underwater vehicles

Accurate Autonomous Underwater Vehicles positioning requires an appropriate control design which takes into account the nonlinear coupling between the different degrees of freedom. Assuming a vehicle equipped with two side-thruster modules including two tunnel thrusters each, the control problem will be split into an outer control loop handling the motion of the vehicle, and an inner control loop designed to track the thrust commanded to each thruster. A multivariable Lyapunov function based approach, characterized by robustness properties with respect to parametric uncertainties and linearly bounded control output, will be proposed for the outer-loop and simulation results will be discussed. Regarding the low-level control framework, the performance of nine different controllers including conventional PI, sliding mode fuzzy controllers, and adaptive schemes such as model reference and sliding mode adaptive controllers, will be compared through theoretical derivations and experimental results. Such a comparison will show the advantages of the adaptive schemes in terms of tuning, robustness, and tracking performances.