Integrated control, guidance and diagnosis for reconfigurable autonomous underwater vehicle control

This paper is concerned with the development of an integrated control design approach for regulation, trajectory tracking, diagnosis and control reconfiguration of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). A three-layer controller architecture is proposed to enhance the autonomy of the vehicle. At the bottom layer, the local feedback controllers are designed using H-infinity/H-2 control design technique to drive the actuators directly. A four-degree-of-freedom controller is used to incorporate the sensor avid actuator faults and to account for the interaction between the regulation and the diagnostic module. A predictive control design technique is employed at the middle layer (guidance) to manoeuvre optimally the AUV along a desired trajectory. A robust filtering scheme is proposed at the top level to provide the necessary information to the guidance system and to reconfigure the system under fault conditions. The condition for global stability is derived and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed technique.