Configurable Performance-Communication Trade-Off for Quaternion-Based AUVs: A Partitioned Hybrid Event-Triggered Approach

The pursuit of long-term safe and stable operation drives advancements in autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). However, maintaining high control performance and efficient use of communication resources remains a major challenge for payload-constrained AUVs. This paper presents an integrated control framework for quaternion-based omnidirectional AUVs, incorporating a unilateral tunable performance (UTP) control strategy, an anti-unwinding switching scheme, and a partitioned hybrid event-triggered mechanism (PHETM). The proposed UTP strategy ensures predefined-time convergence of position and attitude tracking errors without overshoot, while enabling dynamic modulation of both transient and steady-state performance through tunable parameters. Simultaneously, the introduced anti-unwinding scheme resolves quaternion ambiguity, ensuring convergence to the nearest equilibrium and safeguarding predefined performance bounds. Importantly, by leveraging convergence-time indices derived from the UTP strategy, the developed PHETM regulates intra-AUV communication frequency across different control stages. By confining triggering intervals within computable bounds, the PHETM addresses communication bandwidth pre-allocation and mitigates large impulse phenomena, thus enabling a configurable trade-off between control performance and communication frequency. Comprehensive theoretical analyses and simulation results confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed control strategy.