Proceedings of the European Control Conference 1995, Rome, Italy 5-8 September 1995

Proceedings of the European Control Conference 1991, July 2-5, 1991, Grenoble, France

Underwater vehicles present some difficult and very particular control system design problems. These are often the result of nonlinear dynamics and uncertain models, as well as the presence of sometimes unforeseeable environmental disturbances that are difficult to measure or estimate. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles: Modeling, Control Design, and Simulation outlines a novel approach to help readers develop models to simulate feedback controllers for motion planning and design. The book combines useful information on both kinematic and dynamic nonlinear feedback control models, providing simulation results and other essential information, giving readers a truly unique and all-encompassing new perspective on design. Includes MATLAB® Simulations to Illustrate Concepts and Enhance Understanding Starting with an introductory overview, the book offers examples of underwater vehicle construction, exploring kinematic fundamentals, problem formulation, and controllability, among other key topics. Particularly valuable to researchers is the book’s detailed coverage of mathematical analysis as it applies to controllability, motion planning, feedback, modeling, and other concepts involved in nonlinear control design. Throughout, the authors reinforce the implicit goal in underwater vehicle design—to stabilize and make the vehicle follow a trajectory precisely. Fundamentally nonlinear in nature, the dynamics of AUVs present a difficult control system design problem which cannot be easily accommodated by traditional linear design methodologies. The results presented here can be extended to obtain advanced control strategies and design schemes not only for autonomous underwater vehicles but also for other similar problems in the area of nonlinear control.

A significant shortcoming of the state space control theory that emerged in the 1960s was its lack of concern for the issue of robustness. However, in the design of feedback control systems, robustness is a critical issue. These facts led to great activity in the research area of robust control theory. One of the major developments of modern control theory was the Kalman Filter and hence the development of a robust version of the Kalman Filter has become an active area of research. Although the issue of robustness in filtering is not as critical as in feedback control (where there is always the issue of instability to worry about), research on robust filtering and state estimation has remained very active in recent years. However, although numerous books have appeared on the topic of Kalman filtering, this book is one of the first to appear on robust Kalman filtering. Most of the material presented in this book derives from a period of research collaboration between the authors from 1992 to 1994. However, its origins go back earlier than that. The first author (LR. P. ) became in terested in problems of robust filtering through his research collaboration with Dr. Duncan McFarlane. At this time, Dr. McFarlane was employed at the Melbourne Research Laboratories ofBHP Ltd. , a large Australian min erals, resources, and steel processing company.

The book presents a significant expansion in depth and breadth of the previous edition. It includes substantially more numerical illustrations and copious supporting MATLAB code that the reader can use to replicate illustrations or build his or her own. The code is deliberately written to be as simple as possible and easy to edit. The book is an excellent starting point for any researcher to gain a solid grounding in MPC concepts and algorithms before moving into application or more advanced research topics. Sample problems for readers are embedded throughout the chapters, and in-text questions are designed for readers to demonstrate an understanding of concepts through numerical simulation.