Reducing actuator switchings for motion control of autonomous underwater vehicles

A priority when designing control strategies for autonomous underwater vehicles is to emphasize their cost of implementation on a real vehicle. Indeed, the major issue is that due to the vehicles' design and actuation modes usually under consideration for underwater platforms, the number of actuator switchings must be kept to a small value to ensure feasibility and precision. This constraint is typically not satisfied by optimal trajectories, for instance. Our goal is to provide a trajectory which preserves with great accuracy some of the properties of a desired trajectory that reduces the implementation cost. We first introduce the theoretical framework and illustrate our algorithm on two AUV applications. In both cases, we can achieve similar localization results in the same fixed time with respect to the reference trajectory, but with significantly fewer actuator switchings.