Trajectory Following Control of AUV: A Robust Approach

A robust control technique based on the second method of Lyapunov is proposed in this paper for accurate trajectory tracking of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The difficulty in control of AUVs not only resides in the highly non-linear and coupled dynamics but is enhanced by modeling errors, parametric uncertainty and payload variations depending on application requirements. Environmental hazards such as ocean currents sometimes dominate and render the control of underwater systems more challenging. The proposed control technique addresses the design of a robust controller for AUVs incorporating the effects of the aforementioned uncertain paradigms with known bounds. The controller performance is verified using the real-life parameters of an operational AUV considering a few uncertainties.