Modeling and Attitude Control of an Autonomous Underwater Glider

A model based control is developed here for the attitude control of an autonomous underwater glider. A Slocum Glider™ is considered and general kinematic and dynamic models are derived. These models are used by a Model Predictive Controller to impose the internal actuator configuration that steers the glider to the desired attitude. A two level hierarchical control architecture is proposed, where the higher-level controller imposes the internal configuration of the glider and the lower-level controller computes the actuator actions for maintaining the imposed internal configuration. The performance of the proposed control scheme has been tested in a numerical simulation context and the developed tests verify the imposed requirements and constraints fulfilment. The proposed controller represents an efficient solution for the attitude control of gliders that can be organised in formations to achieve ocean exploration tasks.