Diving Autopilot Design for Underwater Vehicles Using an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Sliding Mode Controller

In general, the diving dynamics of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) has been derived under various assumptions on the motion of the vehicle in vertical plane. Usually, pitch angle of AUV is assumed to be small in maneuvering, so that the nonlinear dynamics in the depth motion of the vehicle could be linearized. However, a small-pitch-angle is a somewhat strong restricting condition and may cause serious modeling inaccuracies of AUV’s dynamics. For this reason, many researchers concentrated their interests on the applications of adaptive control methodology to the motion control of underwater vehicle. In this chapter, we directly resolve the nonlinear equation of the AUV’s diving motion without any restricting assumption on the pitch angle in diving model. The proposed adaptive neuro-fuzzy sliding mode controller (ANFSMC) with a proportional + integral + derivative (PID) sliding surface is derived so that the actual depth position tracks the desired trajectory despite uncertainty, nonlinear dynamics and external disturbances. In the proposed control structure, the corrective term is approximated by a continuous fuzzy logic control and the equivalent control is determined by a feedforward neural network. The weights of the neural network are updated such that the corrective control term of the ANFSMC goes to zero. The adaptive laws are employed to adjust the output scaling factor and to compute PID sliding surface coefficients. Finally, the lyapunov theory is employed to prove the stability of the ANFSMC for trajectory tracking of diving behaviors. Simulation results show that this control strategy can attain excellent control performance.