A novel cascaded trajectory tracking control for UUVs under time-varying disturbances

Abstract

In this paper, a novel cascaded trajectory tracking control strategy based on the characteristics of kinematics and dynamics is proposed for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) under complex disturbances. A kinematic controller based on an improved model predictive control (MPC) is designed to solve the speed jump problem by considering system constraints. Moreover, an improved whale optimizer with elite strategy (EIWOA) is used to the rolling optimization process of MPC, ensuring that the global best solution is derived by obtaining the elite individuals in the population. Besides, a dynamic controller that consists of an adaptive disturbance observer and a fuzzy integral sliding mode control (ADO-FISMC) is proposed to obtain optimal thrust force under time-varying disturbances. The benefit of ADO lies in that it can estimate time-varying disturbances without specific information about disturbances. The fuzzy logic system is introduced to alleviate the chattering of sliding mode control. The simulation results demonstrate the great tracking performance of the cascaded trajectory tracking controller. The viability of the proposed algorithm is also confirmed by trials conducted in water pools.