Control of the SIRENE Underwater Shuttle : System Design and Tests at Sea .

This paper describes theoretical and practical issues that arose during the development of the control and guidance systems for SIRENE, an autonomous underwater shuttle for the transport and accurate positioning of benthic laboratories in the seabed down to a depth of 4000 meters. The nonlinear hydrodynamic model of the vehicle is described, and a class of sliding mode control laws for vehicle stabilization and steering in the vertical and horizontal planes is derived. The control algorithms are combined with a classical line-of-sight guidance law, and the performance of the resulting system is evaluated in a computer based simulation of a realistic mission scenario. The paper concludes with a description of experimental results obtained during a series of sea tests carried out by the French Agency IFREMER and the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) off the coast of Toulon, France.