Optimal and Adaptive Control of Underwater Vehicles

This article contains a continuous-time optimal and adaptive control scheme for underwater vehicles moving in six degrees of freedom. The control scheme is an extension of the algorithm of [4] and a modification of the algorithm found in [6]. The algorithm is optimal in the sense that it minimizes the state errors and the forces which contribute to the vehicle´s kinetic energy that is spend to correct these errors. The performance measure does also contain a term which penalizes the quadratic tracking errors proportional to the rate of energy which dissipates from the system due to damping.