Real-time hybrid design of tracking control and obstacle avoidance for underactuated underwater vehicles

Abstract

For underactuated underwater vehicles, a real-time hybrid design of dynamic tracking control law is proposed for trajectory tracking and obstacle avoidance. In recent works, sliding mode control (SMC) law has been presented and experimentally implemented for position tracking of an underactuated autonomous surface vessel. It is extended to the underactuated underwater vehicle case and finds it still work for trajectory tracking problem. The thruster saturation problem is considered for the real case. The major innovation is the solution of how to deal with obstacle avoidance in the predefined trajectory tracking mission. In order to deal with this problem, a hybrid control strategy is proposed for static and dynamic obstacle case respectively. Then, to show the effectiveness of the proposed method, trajectory tracking control under different conditions are conducted including static and dynamic obstacles. The experiment results show that the proposed method can deal with tracking and obstacle avoidance quite well.