Three‐dimensional path following control of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles with nonzero roll dynamics: A novel line‐of‐sight‐guided approach

Abstract

Most existing path following control approaches for underactuated Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) assumed that the roll angle can be passively stabilized at zero, and simplified the problem to the 5‐degree‐of‐freedom model. However, in practice, the roll motion suffers from undesirable oscillations induced by environmental disturbances, unbalanced propeller torque, etc. To preserve the stability of the system under nonzero roll dynamics, this paper proposes a novel line‐of‐sight‐ (LOS) guided path following control approach. Firstly, the spatial path following error dynamics model is derived to comprehensively reveal the negative effect of roll dynamics. Secondly, an improved LOS guidance law is designed to compensate for the nonzero roll angle. A salient feature is that the proposed guidance law can be applied to the underwater vehicle no matter it is underactuated in the roll motion or not. Thirdly, by assigning the guidance angles to the desired attitude angles, a robust attitude tracking controller is developed, in which the adaptive estimation technique is employed to handle the lumped uncertainties. The tanh‐based saturation function is incorporated such that the resultant control signals are inherently bounded. The closed‐loop path following and attitude tracking errors are proved to be globally asymptotically stable at the origin. Comparative simulation results are provided to substantiate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.