Performance Comparison of Controllers for the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle REMUS 100

Autonomous underwater vehicles have been found to be particularly useful for gathering data as well as other tasks such as building sub-sea infrastructure. Due to the uncertainty of the environment, and the nonlinear dynamics of the vehicles, controlling them is typically an involved task. Albeit a number of controller designs are possible, and several are available in the literature, it is unclear which designs are better suited for specific vehicles. In this paper, we design classical controllers, linear quadratic regulators and sliding mode controllers for the depth and steering subsystems of the Oceanographic Systems Laboratory’s REMUS 100. Based on the performances of these designs, we suggest appropriate controllers for the two subsystems.