Optimal Control System for a Semi-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

This work presents a proposal of Navigation and Control System (NCS) to a Semi-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (SAUV) under construction at the University of SÃo Paulo (USP). Three horizontal Degrees-of-Freedom (DoF) are controlled to track reference trajectories determined by a support station, responsible for the guidance of the vehicle. The NCS is basically a Linear Quadratic (LQ) Trajectory Tracker fed by an estimated state vector, with some other interesting functionalities included. All results were obtained by computational simulations with a nonlinear model of the plant of the SAUV driven by the NCS.