Robust Controllability of Underwater Vehicles and Their Design Optimization

There are various designs and control tasks for marine systems (MS), where continuously increasing demands for higher speed, improved motion accuracy, and reduced energy consumption are to be satisfied. In order to achieve such complicated performance optimization, it is very important to study MS controllability and their design criteria. An explicit, necessary and sufficient condition has been found to guarantee robustness of decentralized controllers against arbitrary, but bounded disturbances. Thus the feedback control design can be based on optimal trade-off relationships between the bounds of disturbances and the control force limits. These and other reasonable design criteria will be considered in this paper. The design concepts will be illustrated with several examples concerning shape, mass distribution, as well as actuators sizes and locations of controlled MS.