Unilateral trajectory tracking control of autonomous underwater vehicles with system constraints

Abstract

The paper studies the trajectory tracking control problem of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) with practical constraints via economic model predictive control (EMPC) strategy. The cost function in EMPC is designed with two parts. One part is the trajectory tracking cost and the other part is the economic cost which is utilized to keep the AUV tracking within one side of the trajectory. We term this type of trajectory tracking as the unilateral trajectory tracking, which can be applied for hazardous area tracking and obstacle avoidance of AUVs. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified via thorough simulation studies.