An Artificial Bee Colony Based PID Controller for Depth Control of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

Depth control of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) has been received tremendous attention as one of the most vital applications in ocean exploration. The unknown dynamic model, the wave, and swerve motions coupling of the AUV make the proportional integral derivative (PID) controllers and most of the other methods inefficient to solve the existing practical control problems. To cover this issue, an Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) method is applied to tune the PID parameters of depth control of an AUV control system. The proposed controller achieves the steady-state 0.1320 seconds and significantly reduces the overshoot rate. The simulations show that the effectiveness of the ABC-based control scheme is comparable to other controllers and has better performance.