Two-Loop System with Reference Model for Control of Spatial Movement of Cargo Underwater Vehicle

Currently, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) are increasingly used to perform tasks related to the maintenance of underwater communications and various underwater production complexes, as well as performing underwater technological operations. To effectively perform these operations, AUV must have high-quality control systems that will ensure their accurate movement both along long spatial trajectories formed during their movement to the objects of work, and when performing complex maneuvers near underwater infrastructure objects. At the same time, the main difficulty that arises in the process of synthesis of AUV control systems is the significant non-linearity of the dynamic models of these control objects, the presence of interactions between their degrees of freedom, as well as the uncertainty and variability of their parameters. In this paper, we propose a method for synthesizing the spatial motion control system of the AUV, which allows us to take into account these negative effects. This system contains two loops. The first loop includes a combined system containing a nonlinear controller to achieve the desired dynamic characteristics of the AUV, when its parameters are equal to the nominal values, and a controller with self-tuning according to the reference model, which provides compensation for an unknown or variable part of the parameters. In this case, the parameters of the controller with the reference model are selected to reduce the possible amplitude of the discontinuous signal for controlling the AUV velocity. The second loop is a non-linear position controller that allows to take into account the dynamic properties of the velocity control loop and the kinematic properties of the AUV. The advantage of the proposed control system in comparison with traditional ones based on PID controllers is a higher control accuracy when moving along complex spatial trajectories, regardless of changes in the AUV parameters. The simulation results confirmed the high efficiency of the synthesized two-loop control system.