Design and Simulation Tools for Multivariable Control of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

The development of a control system for an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) is widely agreed to be a demanding task. On the one hand, UUVs may exhibit a substantial number of actuators of diverse type, such as propellers, flaps and thrusters. On the other hand, frequently a complex navigation system has to be implemented to combine measurements from various sensors. Thus, from a control engineering point of view, they are distinctly multi input, multi output systems. This fact alone makes the development of a control system a complex problem, irrespective of other issues like nonlinearities, environmental disturbances or model uncertainties. We present an integrated simulation and control design framework which is intended to reduce the overall development and testing time for multivariable UUV control systems. This is achieved by maintaining complete independence between simulation and control design tools on the one hand and individual vehicle actuator configurations and particular control tasks on the other hand. We demonstrate how model based control design methods can be used within this approach in a flexible way and, particularly, that this framework, once established, can be easily extended to other vehicles and control modes