Design method for a new control system for an autonomous underwater vehicle using linear matrix inequalities

The independent administrative corporation Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) has developed a small light autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) named marine robot experimental 1 (MR-X1). The motion control of MR-X1 is considered in this article. Since the dynamics of MR-X1 mainly depends on its own speed, the motion control is a nonlinear control system. We propose a new controller design method for this system using linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). This algorithm gives a solution as a linear matrix inequality, and can be adapted to solve many LMIs simultaneously. LMIs can be obtained by substituting several speeds into the dynamics of the MR-X1. The proposed controller, which can be derived from the solution of the LMIs, was adapted to MR-X1 and showed good performance in experiments.