• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.33 no.8
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• pp.1203-1211
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• 2009

The dynamics of underwater vehicles can be greatly influenced by the dynamics of the vehicle thrusters. The control of the state of the hovering or very slow motion of the underwater vehicle is most important for automatic docking or control of the manipulator of the vehicle. The dynamics of the thruster based on the electric motor is nonlinear and has uncertain parameters. Since the dynamics of the vehicle coupled with the dynamics of the thruster is nonlinear and has uncertain parameters, a robust control is very effective for a desired motion tracking of the uncertain and nonlinear vehicle. In this paper a study was performed on the robust control scheme of the very slow motion or hovering motion of the underwater vehicle actuated by the electric motor. Also, a concurrent control on the state of the vehicle with nonlinearity and uncertain parameters was performed. A sliding mode control algorithm out of robust controllers was designed and applied, which compensates the nonlinear forces and uncertain parameters of the vehicle and actuator. Through a computer simulation, the proposed control scheme was compared with a linear PD controller and its superior performance was validated.