Experimental evaluation of depth controllers for a small-size AUV

This paper presents the experimental evaluation of different depth control strategies for a small sized low-cost autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). A cascaded adaptive dynamic model (AdaptDM) control law is introduced to compensate for environmental disturbances. The controller is based on a cascaded structure and the gains of the architecture are estimated based on the interactions between the controller components. This control architecture is compared with the classical decoupled Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller when the vehicle performs tasks in unstructured environments. For controlled environments we evaluated the behaviour of the AdaptDM controller with Proportional Integral Limited (PILIM) structure and a nonlinear sliding mode (SM) controller. The experimental results show low steady-state error when AdaptDM is used, leading to smooth behaviours of small size AUVs performing environmental monitoring.

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