Design and Performance Analysis of Automatic Control Systems for Underwater Vehicles

This paper is concerned with the development of fully Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for deep ocean scientific and commercial applications. Specifically, it is regarding the design of automatic feedback control systems for AUV attitude control. The design method used in this paper formulates the AUV attitude control problem within the framework of the Optimal Control Theory. This approach determines an optimal control law that keeps the state of a dynamic system near a constant reference state while minimizing a quadratic cost functional. This study has developed four optimal control laws based on different performance criteria. First, the standard Linear Quadratic performance index was used to obtain a baseline control design. The LQR control law has been found to be undesirable because it resulted in a closed-loop system with fast and slow dynamics. In order to place the closed-loop eigenvalues close to each other, a pole placement algorithm has been used in connection with the LQR performance index. Two control laws have been designed based on this approach. Finally, a fourth design has been obtained by using a Hilbert Space Norm (also known as H/sub 2/ Norm or Root-Mean-Square) performance index. The main reason for designing a control law based on H/sub 2/ Norm performance index was to minimize the fuel consumption of the AUV for longer endurance. The stability and performance characteristics of the four optimal control laws have been analyzed via computer simulation and frequency response studies. All the closed-loop AUV systems exhibited overdamped response without any overshoot. Because the yaw and pitch channels have right hand zeros indicating the controllers have finite gain margins in these two channels. Hence, stability robustness of the AUV controllers can not be ignored and must be the subject of more detailed investigation in the future.