Control of a Buoyancy-Based Pilot Underwater Lifting Body

This paper is about position control of a specific small-scale pilot underwater lifting body where the lifting force stems from buoyancy adjusted with an air pocket in the lifting body. A mathematical model is developed to get a basis for a simulator which is used for testing and for designing the control system, including tuning controller parameters. A number of different position controller solutions were tried both on a simulator and on the physical system. Successful control on both the simulator and the physical system was obtained with cascade control based on feedback from measured position and height of the air pocket in the lifting body. The primary and the secondary controllers of the cascade control system were tuned using Skogestad's model-based PID tuning rules. Feedforward from estimated load force was implemented in combination with the cascade control system, giving a substantial improvement of the position control system, both with varying position reference and varying disturbance (load mass).