Robust Control of Manned Submersible Vehicle With Nonlinear MPC and Disturbance Observer

Dear Editor, This letter focuses on the trajectory tracking of 7000 m JIAO-LONG manned submersible vehicle (MSV) with disturbances. The robust controller is realized by a composite control law, where an analytical nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) component is proposed to meet the requirements on tracking performance, and a feedforward control component is developed to reject the external disturbance and model uncertainty on the basis of a disturbance observer (DOB). Furthermore, the stability of the MSV system is analyzed, and representative simulation results are also given. The most significant feature of the designed MPC controller is that an explicit control law can be obtained for the MSV system, which alleviates the computational burden largely.