A Robust Reach Set MPC Scheme for Control of AUVs

Abstract

A Robust Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme for the control of formations of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) is presented and discussed. This application domain is extremely relevant and exhibits very difficult control challenges: (i) slow, low data-rate acoustic communications, (ii) significant perturbations inherent to the hydrodynamic environment, (iii) unexpected emergence of obstacles, and (iv) severe onboard computation constraints. While the later aspect is discussed by the Reach Set MPC scheme implementation which maximizes the a priori off-line computation as enabled by taking into account, as much as possible, invariant data, the other challenges are addressed by increasing the robustness of the proposed basic MPC scheme by considering a number of intermediate steps which, in spite of the increase of the on-line computational burden, this remains strongly lower than the one associated with typical standard MPC schemes.