Double-Loop Integral Terminal Sliding Mode Tracking Control for UUVs With Adaptive Dynamic Compensation of Uncertainties and Disturbances

This paper focuses on the trajectory tracking control of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) in the presence of dynamic uncertainties and time-varying external disturbances. Two adaptive integral terminal sliding mode control schemes, namely, adaptive integral terminal sliding mode control (AITSMC) scheme and adaptive fast integral terminal sliding mode control (AFITSMC) scheme are proposed for UUVs based on integral terminal sliding mode (ITSM) and fast ITSM (FITSM), respectively. Each control scheme is double-looped: composed of a kinematic controller and a dynamic controller. First, a kinematic controller is designed for each of the two control schemes. The two kinematic controllers are based on ITSM and FITSM, respectively. These kinematic controllers yield local finite-time convergence of the position tracking errors to zero meanwhile avoid the singularity problem in the conventional terminal sliding mode control (TSMC). Then, using the output of the kinematic controller as a reference velocity command, a dynamic controller is developed for each of the two control schemes. The two dynamic controllers are also based on ITSM and FITSM, respectively. An adaptive mechanism is introduced to estimate the unknown parameters of the upper bound of the lumped system uncertainty which consists of dynamic uncertainties and time-varying external disturbances so that the prior knowledge of the upper bound of the lumped system uncertainty is not required. The estimated parameters are then used as controller parameters to eliminate the effects of the lumped system uncertainty. The convergence rate of the integral terminal sliding variable vector is investigated and the local finite-time convergence of the velocity tracking errors to zero in the ITSM or FITSM is obtained. Finally, based on the designed kinematic and dynamic controllers, the finite-time stability of the full closed-loop cascaded system is shown. The two proposed control schemes improve the tracking accuracy over the existing globally finite-time stable tracking control (GFTSTC) and adaptive nonsingular TSMC schemes, and enhance the robustness against parameter uncertainties and external disturbances over the GFTSTC scheme. Compared with the conventional adaptive integral sliding mode control (AISMC) scheme, the two proposed control schemes offer faster convergence rate and stronger robustness against dynamic uncertainties and time-varying external disturbances for the trajectory tracking control of UUVs due to involving the fractional integrator. Comparative numerical simulations are performed on the dynamic model of the Omni Directional Intelligent Navigator UUV for two trajectory tracking cases. The convergence rate and robustness to uncertainties and disturbances are quantified as the convergent time and bounds of the steady-state position and velocity tracking errors, respectively. The results show that the two proposed control schemes improve at least 20s in convergence rate and enhance about 2% robustness in position tracking and 20% robustness in velocity tracking over the AISMC scheme.