Underwater Vehicle Modeling and Control Application to Ciscrea Robot Rui Yang ⋆1, 2, 3 , Irvin Probst 2 , Ali Mansours 2, 3 , Ming Li 1 , and Benoit Clement 2, 3 1 College of Engineering, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266100, China. 2 ENSTA Bretagne, 29806 Brest Cedex 9, France. 3 Lab-STICC(UMR CNRS 6285), Technopole Brest Iroise, 29238 Brest Cedex 3. {yang.rui,irvin.probst,benoit.clement}@ensta-bretagne.fr mansour@ieee.org,limingneu@ouc.edu.cn Abstract. Underwater competitions confirm that the PID yaw con- troller is less efficient for low mass Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) to handle the robot uncertainties. Nonlinear hydrodynamic be- havior, waves, current, AUV bouyance change, motor calibration vari- ations, sensor disturbance and battery variations perturbate the PID control behavior a lot. Therefore, in this paper we present a model based robust controller to control the yaw heading of AUV CISCREA. The modeling result was verified with experiments, and the robust controller was simulated. Keywords: Underwater Vehicle, Added Mass, Damping, Robust. 1 Introduction AUVs are playing important roles in underwater activities. For some applica- tions: undersea pipeline survey, infrastructure inspections and large vehicle wet maintenance tasks, a small size cubic AUV is preferred. Indeed, small AUVs can be deployed to explore areas where HOVs (Human Occupied Vehicles) and ROVs (Remote Operating Vehicles) are limited to operate. Meanwhile, the cu- bic AUVs show more degrees of freedom than torpedo-shaped AUVs in motion. Especially, they can hover and enter complex underwater spaces. Achieving maneuverability of small AUV depends on two key factors: an ac- curate hydrodynamic model and an advanced control system. In [24], Yamamoto pointed out that a model-based control system is more effective if the vehicle’s dynamics are modeled to some extent. Meanwhile, in [9], Ferreira et al. showed that an empirical linear model often fails to represent the dynamics of the AUV over a wide operating region. Therefore, obtaining hydrodynamic models of the complex-shaped cubic AUV is one of the key points for better maneuverability. Actually, many methods exist to model ocean vehicles, including scaled ex- periments, full-scale experiments, empirical formula approximations and compu- tational dynamic approaches. Scaled and full-scale experiments are capable to ⋆ This work was supported by the China Scholarship Council.