Adaptive Tracking Control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Under Stochastic Environmental Disturbances

Many practical tasks in the ocean depend on autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). In order to accomplish these tasks, tracking control is the most basic and critical application of AUV. However, due to the influence of stochastic environmental disturbances, it is very difficult for AUV to achieve accurate trajectory tracking in practical application. In this paper, the problem of trajectory tracking control under stochastic environmental disturbances is studied. Considering this problem, we establish an AUV model with stochastic environmental disturbances. Based on the backstepping method, the adaptive tracking controller is designed to deal with the uncertain part of stochastic disturbances. By using the Lyapunov stability analysis, it is proved that tracking errors converge to a small neighborhood of zero. This shows that the AUV can track the desired trajectory accurately. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical method is verified by simulation.