Design of an adaptive nonlinear controller for an autonomous underwater vehicle equipped with a vectored thruster

The tasks Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are expected to perform are becoming more and more challenging. Thus, to be able to address such tasks, we implemented a high maneuverability propulsion system: a vectored thruster. The design of a vehicle equipped with such a propulsion system will be presented, from a mechanical, electronic and software point of view. The motion control of the resulting system is fairly complex, and no suitable controller is available in the literature. Accordingly, we will present the derivation of a novel tracking controller, whose adaptive properties will compensate for the lack of knowledge of the system's parameters. Computer simulations are provided and show the performance and robustness of the proposed control algorithm to external perturbations, unmodelled dynamics and dynamics variation. We finally illustrate the advantage of using an adaptive controller by comparing the presented controller to a Proportional Integral Derivative controller.