Control of an AUV with saturating actuators: classical and LMI based design approaches

The problem of designing the diving controller for the autonomous underwater vehicle MAUVE is discussed in this paper. To reflect all the control features and specifically the actuator saturation, a LMI-based controller design with input saturation is presented. Then, a structured controller (pitch and depth control loops) is designed using a heuristic based on classical methods which explicitly takes into account the saturation constraint. Finally, the convex synthesis method is applied to design the diving controller. Numerical simulations show that the LMI controller presents some advantages.