Control of an autonomous underwater vehicle subject to robustness constraints

Abstract

In this paper, we present a method to compute a control law for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) subject to external disturbances. The control law’s design objectives are formulated as H∞ objectives used to synthesize a robust controller. Then, a robustness analysis of AUV model uncertainties is performed without conservatism with interval analysis and global optimization in order to validate the control law. We emphasize the advantage of our approach by comparing it with two other classical design methods with simulations and experiments.