Comparative Study of Chattering-Free Sliding Mode Controllers Applied to an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)

This paper carried out a comparative study between three different Sliding Mode Control strategies applied to an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle’s (AUV) position control in 6 DOFs, under the influence of wind, waves and ocean currents. The comparative study aims to avoid the Chattering effects looking for an acceptable trade-off between tracking error performance and closed-loop system stability. To this end, stability proofs and computational simulations for the control strategies were performed with satisfactory results.