Path Following With Prescribed Performance for Under-Actuated Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Subjects to Unknown Actuator Dead-Zone

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of path following with prescribed performance for autonomous underwater vehicles subjects to unknown actuator dead-zone nonlinearity. To cope with this practical problem abstracted from hydrodynamic noise measurement, an adaptive command filtered backstepping method with actuator dead-zone compensation is proposed. By introducing a damped exponential barrier functions, new tracking errors are defined to satisfy the prescribed performance requirements. The path following control method is theoretically based on the command filtered backstepping technique for handling the complexity explosion problem attribute to the repeating derivations. Moreover, the filter compensation mechanism is designed to eliminate the negative effect of the filter errors. To deal with the actuator dead-zone nonlinearity, a fuzzy logic system based dead-zone compensation method is developed that dose not need the inverse of the dead-zones. Numerical simulations are conducted to demonstrate the theoretical analysis, and the usefulness and potential of the new design scheme is revealed.