Optimal control of an autonomous underwater vehicle

This paper presents the optimal control of the kinematic model of an autonomous underwater vehicle. An optimal feedback control methodology is developed for the trajectory tracking of underwater vehicles. The motion of underwater vehicles is presented first as a kinematic model. For the design of feedback control, the system is linearized and transformed into a chained form. The control for trajectory tracking of the kinematic model is presented as an H-2 optimal design. Formulating LQG as H-2 optimization is useful as it can be generalized to include frequency-domain performance specifications.