Horizontal Trajectory Tracking of Underactuated AUV using Backstepping Approach

Abstract

The paper proposes a control scheme for trajectory tracking in horizontal plane for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles(AUVs) which include underactuated characteristics causing difficulty to design controller. By introducing appropriate coordinate transform, it is shown that the error dynamics of AUVs can be arranged in the strict feedback form. Based on the error dynamics, the proposed controller is designed using the backstepping approach. Lyapunov-based analysis shows that the proposed controller can converge the tracking error asymptotically. Through the simulation with REMUS model having three degree-of-freedom(surge, sway, yaw), it is shown that the AUV with the proposed controller can track the desired trajectory with accurate performance even when the controller contains dynamic model error.