Following control for a UUV using temporary path generation guidance

Abstract

A path following control algorithm for an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) using temporary path generation guidance was proposed in this paper. Owing to different initial states of the vehicle, such as position and orientation, the path following control in the horizontal plane may yield a poor performance. To deal with the negative effect induced by initial states, a temporary path generation was presented based on the relationship between the original reference path and the vehicle’s initial states. With different relative positions between the vehicle and reference path, including out of straight lines, as well as inside and outside a circle, the related temporary paths guiding the vehicle to the reference path were able to be generated in real time. The vehicle was guided to steer along the temporary path until it reached the tangent point at the reference path, where the controller was designed using the input-output feedback linearization method. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is effective under the three different situations mentioned above.