The path-following control of the underactuated AUV with input saturation and multiple disturbances

Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) in marine resource surveys plays an important role. This paper proposes a new path-following control frame for the underactuated AUV with input saturation and multiple disturbances. The disturbances include external disturbances, model parameter uncertainties, unmodeled dynamics and other random disturbances. Compared to most of previously published literatures, which treat disturbances as lumped disturbances, a composite hierarchical anti-disturbance control (CHADC) strategy is adopted to achieve higher precision path following. A disturbance observer (DOB) is constructed to estimate and eliminate the disturbances with partial known information, while the H ∞ theory is used to optimize the path-following controller to attenuate the other disturbances satisfying the L 2-norm bound condition and improve the robustness of system. Besides, Lyapunov direct method and back-stepping method are used to design the path-following controller, where the input saturation is considered, the extended state observer (ESO) is used to estimate the uncertainty of kinematic controller and the nonlinear tracking differentiator (NTD) is used to simplify the controller. Finally, simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control law.