Robust Adaptive PI Control of Wave Energy Converters with Uncertain and Nonlinear Dynamics

There exist several approaches to design the optimal control strategy to harvest wave energy with a point absorber. However they are generally based on the assumption that the WEC and the PTO dynamics are well-known. In the practical WEC control implementation, this is generally not the case. The objective of this paper is to design a robust optimal control strategy that can take into account the uncertain WEC and PTO dynamics. Our choice is a robust adaptive PI control law. The proposed controller is validated and compared through simulation for irregular sea states.