Adaptive sliding mode tracking control of underwater vehicle-manipulator systems considering dynamic disturbance

Abstract

This paper proposes an adaptive sliding mode tracking control method with a nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO-ASMTC) to solve the trajectory tracking problem of the underwater vehicle-manipulator system (UVMS) in the presence of large dynamic uncertainties and severe external disturbances. The proposed NDO-ASMTC method employs an adaptive control law, an improved fractional-order sliding mode, and a nonlinear disturbance observer to achieve excellent tracking performance of the UVMS. To obtain a fast response speed in the sliding mode phase and eliminate static error in the reaching phase, a modified fractional-order sliding mode control scheme is proposed. An adaptive auto-tuning law of switching gains is presented to overcome the problem that the fixed switching gain may lead to obvious tracking performance degradation under lumped uncertainty. In addition, a nonlinear disturbance observer is implemented to maintain the robustness and stability of the control scheme under severe disturbances. Moreover, the proposed adaptive control scheme has been proved to be stable using the Lyapunov theorem. Simulations and experiments show that the proposed control scheme can meet the design requirements of the UVMS in terms of tracking accuracy, system stability, and interference attenuation under the application of external disturbances.