Experimental results on smooth path tracking with application to pipe surveying on inexpensive AUV

Path following of marine surface vehicles with dynamical uncertainty and time-varying ocean disturbances

“…There have been a number of results focused on the subject of designing path following strategies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. A complete path following strategy consists of three parts: the path planing, the guidance, and the velocity controller.…”

“…A popular and effective guidance algorithm adopted in path following is the LOS guidance [4,5,6,7,8,9]. In [5], an LOS based path following design is presented for pipe surveying using a low cost autonomous vehicle. In [6], an LOS principle in 3D is proposed in path following design for an underwater robotic vehicle.…”

“…In [6], an LOS principle in 3D is proposed in path following design for an underwater robotic vehicle. One limitation in [5,6] is that the sideslip angle, which represents the angle between vehicle's moving orientation and the vehicle's heading, is ignored. In fact, although the sideslip is relatively small, it largely affects the performance of the path following.…”

“…Various control methods have been adopted, ranging from PID control [5], sliding mode control [4,10], backstepping control [7] and fuzzy control [6]. In addition, there have been considerable studies in NN based velocity controller for MSVs, due to the approximation capacity of NN for nonlinear dynamics [10,11,12,13,14,15,16].…”

“…(2) In contrast to the traditional LOS guidance [5,6], an integral LOS algorithm capable of canceling the effect of sideslip is proposed in this paper. The undesired drift force caused by waves, winds, ocean currents, or other external disturbances can be completely avoided.…”