Song, D.; Guo, T.; Sun, W.; Jiang, Q., and Yang, H., 2018. Using an active disturbance rejection decoupling control algorithm to improve operational performance for underwater glider applications.

The underwater glider is a large time-delaying, time-varying, nonlinear, and strong coupling control system that allows for various submarine environmental monitoring applications. To solve the coupling problem between pitch angle and velocity, improve control accuracy, and reduce settling time for energy consumption for the glider, a dynamic surface decoupling control (DSDC) algorithm based on the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is described in this paper. By importing the dynamic surface decoupling control law and first-order low-pass filter to improve control precision and reduce the number of calculations, a decoupling algorithm based on ADRC was used to solve the coupled control problem for an underwater glider. Combining the mathematical equation for motion and the kinematic equation for an underwater glider, the DSDC-ADRC algorithm was implanted into the controller. Simulation tests and sea trials showed that it reduced overshoot by 20% and had a 100 s settling time compared with the proportion, integration, and differentiation (PID) algorithm. Sea trials indicated that the decreased overshoot and settling time could save 23% battery energy, which would extend the sail distance 29.9% further than before.