Submarine control system using sliding mode controller with optimization algorithm

The purpose of this paper is to design and implement the pitch and depth control system of an autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). This control system will determine the best pitch angle as well as the depth automatically when there are changes in speed, weight, etc. In this paper, the kinematic and dynamic equations of motion for the AUV are derived to obtain the pitch angle and depth transfer functions. The control strategies applied here, are firstly, the sliding mode controller (SMC) driven by particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Secondly, the proportional integral derivative controller (PID) tuned by PSO algorithm as a standard controller. The PSO algorithm is used as an efficient algorithm to search for the optimal controllers’ parameters and hence improving the performance of the system. The findings show that the designed sliding mode control (SMC) could improve the stability and performance and provides more realistic behavior for the AUV compared to other classical controllers and according to pitch and the depth changes.