Model Predictive Control for Stabilization of Underwater Vehicle Dynamics

Autonomous underwater vehicles are useful for investigating environmental condition under rivers, lakes, ponds, seas. The wide range of applications of underwater vehicles might motivate researchers to study control system design problems for autonomous underwater vehicles. Model predictive control is a well-known control methodology in which a performance index over a finite future is optimized and its performance index has moving initial and terminal times. This paper examines the stabilization problem of unsteady motion of underwater vehicle dynamics. The paper aims to propose a stabilization method based on model predictive control for rotational nonlinear dynamics of underwater vehicles. This paper provides a numerical solution method based on so-called C/GMRES algorithm to solve the model predictive control problem for stabilization of underwater vehicle nonlinear dynamics. The usefulness of the proposed method is verified by the results of numerical simulations.