Piecewise Compensation Model Predictive Governor Combined With Conditional Disturbance Negation for Underactuated AUV Tracking Control

Abstract

With respect to the accurate tracking control for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), this article proposes a novel control architecture consisting of piecewise compensation model predictive governor and conditional disturbance negation-based active disturbance rejection controller. The designed piecewise compensation mechanism is implemented to eliminate the steady tracking errors resulting from the underactuation problem of AUVs, and the model predictive governor aims to generate reference tracking velocities satisfying the constraints. Concurrently, a finite-time extended state observer is designed to improve the convergence performance of the estimation errors. In addition, the concept of conditional disturbance negation is employed to endow AUVs with the capability of taking advantage of disturbances rather than only rejecting disturbances. Finally, comprehensive analyses of the simulations and the experiments demonstrate the impressive control performance, verifying the feasibility of potential applications on real AUVs.