Robust control for an autonomous underwater vehicle that suppresses pitch and yaw coupling

Attitude control systems for autonomous underwater vehicles are often implemented with separate controllers for pitch motion in the vertical plane and yaw motion in the horizontal plane. We propose a novel time-varying model for a streamlined autonomous underwater vehicle that explicitly displays the coupling between yaw and pitch motion due to nonzero roll angle and/or roll rate. The model facilitates the use of a multi-input multi-output H-infinity control design that is robust to yaw-pitch coupling. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated with field trials. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.