Distributed control of underwater vehicles

Despite the closed-loop performance of centralized multi-variable controllers, the vast majority of control applications are still based on decentralized controllers. Because of their single-loop structure, decentralized controllers cannot suppress interactions of the system, which are only taken into account in the controller tuning phase. Therefore, it would be useful in many cases to tackle the undesirable effects of the interactions on the closed-loop system. A novel model predictive control scheme based on Nash optimality is presented to achieve this goal. In this algorithm the centralized optimization is decomposed into that of several small coupled optimization problems. The relevant computational convergence, the closed-loop performance, and the effect of communication failures on the closed-loop behaviour are analysed. The control problem is illustrated to verify the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed control algorithm.