Fuzzy Trajectory Control Design for Underwater Robot

The URV is operated manually with a joystick or automatically with a computer. The automatic control of the underwater robot is a difficult problem due to its nonlinear dynamics. Moreover, the dynamics can change according to the alteration of configuration to be suited to the mission. In order to cope with those difficulties, the control system should be flexible. An interesting review of classical and modern techniques adapted to control the dynamic behaviour of unmanned underwater vehicles has been provided in [1]. In the paper applying of genetic algorithms to designing of a fuzzy autopilot for trackkeeping control of underwater robot is considered. For the tracking of a reference trajectory, the way-point line of sight scheme is incorporated and three independent fuzzy controllers are used to generate command signals. Parameters of membership functions of input and output are tuned using genetic algorithms. Quality of control is concerned without and in presence of external disturbances. Some computer simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the approach. Nowadays, fuzzy systems find wide practical applications, ranging from soft regulatory control in consumer products to accurate control and modeling of complex nonlinear systems [2,6,7,8,9]. In this paper we design the fuzzy logic autopilot to trackkeeping control of the URV tuning its parameters by genetic algorithms.