Bio-mimetic Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Control Using Time Delayed Estimation Technique

An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is a crewless robotic vehicle that dives into the water and performs without human assistance. This paper focuses on developing trajectory tracking control for bio-mimetic AUV system under uncertain environments. Therefore, a relatively new control technique called time delay-based estimation control is proposed for trajectory tracking under multiple uncertainties. This algorithm estimates the total disturbance in the system using immediate past information of input and output of feedback state and control variables. The benefit of this scheme is that it avoids assumptions about a priori upper bound information of disturbance. Further, the control structure is simple and does not require any high-frequency switching or high gain to nullify the effects of disturbance. The theoretical analysis of the proposed scheme guarantees the uniformly ultimate bounded stability of the closed-loop system. The numerical analysis is also carried out to validate the control performance of the given algorithm for lemniscate reference path tracking.