Underwater vehicle guidance control design within the DexROV project: preliminary results

The paper addresses the guidance control design of the motion controller for an underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) within an European Commission H2020 research project called DexROV. Given a kinematics model of an ROV possibly subject to an ocean current, the problem consists in designing a guidance control law able to realize, within a common and unified framework, several basic control loops denoted as "primitives". The problem is rather standard when considering such primitives individually, but it becomes more challenging when aiming at designing a single general solution able to realize several different primitives according on how the reference signal for the controller is assigned. Moreover, the proposed guidance loop is required to operate in the presence of delays. The proposed solution builds on standard techniques leading to a Proportional - Integral (PI) controller with an adaptive gain selection rule to cope with integrator wind-up phenomena due to vehicle velocity saturation. The designed solution is numerically tested and analysed through simulations accounting for simplified, yet realistic, sensor models including stochastic noise and delays.