ABSTRACT This paper reports on the development of a control module that detects and effectively prevents thruster saturation for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). A model has been developed to approximate the maximum available thrust, per thruster, as a function of the battery voltage sag. A thruster would be considered to be in saturation if its reference input exceeds its particular output limit. This ratio can be expressed as a scalar value, which can be used to adjust the reference thrust vector that is fed to the thruster control system. This approach can minimize the total error vector in the vehicle kinematics
