In order to better understand the behavior of the underwater robot developed at
our laboratory, a simple but relatively good model of the underwater behavior of
the robot had to be developed. In order to be useful for model-based control
techniques onboard the robot, the model had to have low computing requirements,
yet to be complex enough to capture the transient response of the robot. To
achieve this, a system identification approach was taken by first capturing the
robot response to various inputs, and then matching them to a simple model.