Depth control of the biomimetic U-CAT turtle-like AUV with experiments in real operating conditions

International audienceControl of underwater vehicles is a thoroughly investigated subject but still an open problem, because of the environmental disturbances, the highly nonlinear behaviour of vehicles, the complexity of the vehicle hydrodynamics, etc. In this paper, we are interested in depth control of a bioinspired U-CAT underwater AUV in real operating conditions. Two depth control schemes are proposed, including a PID controller and a nonlinear RISE feedback controller. The proposed controllers are implemented on the robot, then tested in an open water environment. The obtained results are presented and discussed through different experimental scenarios to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed controllers, not only to successfully control the depth, but also to be robust towards external disturbances and parameters uncertainties. we conclude that RISE controller is more robust towards environmental disturbances and outperforms the PID controller when the robot is tested in real operating condition