Supervisory cascaded controller design: experiment test on a remotely operated vehicle

The article proposes a cascaded multi-controllers switching scheme for stabilization and pipeline tracking of a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) under hydrodynamic uncertainties. The ROV is inherently non-linear, highly coupled in motions, and vulnerable to hydrodynamic uncertainties. With controllers that cancel the non-linear dynamics, the system is robust against the pre-defined perturbations on the hydrodynamic added mass and the damping terms. The values used in these perturbed terms were obtained numerically using the WAMIT TM software. Compared with other controllers such as proportional-integral and backstepping methods, the pool test showed that the proposed method gives better time domain response and robustness against the perturbed terms.