Adaptive control of an autonomous underwater vehicle: Experimental resultson ODIN

This paper presents a six-degrees-of-freedom controller for autonomous unde rwater vehicles. The control algorithm is adaptive in the dynamic parameter s that are poorly known and time-varying in the underwater environment. Mor eover, the proposed control law adopts quaternions to represent attitude er rors, and thus avoids representation singularities that occur when using in stead Euler angles description of the orientation. The adaptive controller has been successfully implemented and experimentally validated on onmi-dire ctional intelligent navigator (ODIN), an autonomous underwater vehicle that has been designed and built at the University of Hawaii. The experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed controller within the constraints of the sensory system.