A study on the design of a manoeuvring controller for submersible vehicles

This paper considers a sliding mode controller for the depth and course control of a class of submersible vehicles. Since the vehicle used here shows complex dynamic characteristics sensitive to speed variation and buoyancy, robust control of vertical and horizontal plane motions of the vehicle is achieved by using the sliding mode controller whose structure varies according to a pre-designed principle, so called variable structure control. To compare this controller with another in robustness, a PID controller for the same model of vehicle is designed. From various simulations for the two controllers, it is shown that the sliding mode controller is more robust against modeling errors and disturbances.