NAVIGATION, GUIDANCE AND CONTROL OF AUVS - AN APPLICATION TO THE MARIUS VEHICLE

This paper addresses the problem of designing guidance, control and na vigation systems for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Its contri bution is twofold: i) it introduces a new methodology for the integrat ed design of guidance and control, and ii) it describes a novel approa ch to the analysis and design of multi-rate complementary filters for navigation. The methodologies proposed lead to an efficient procedure for the design of controllers for AUVs, to accurately track reference trajectories defined in an inertial reference frame. The paper illustr ates the application of that procedure to the design of a tracking con troller for the MARIUS AUV. The design phase is summarized, and the pe rformance of the resulting controller is assessed in simulations, usin g dynamic models of the vehicle and its sensor suite.