Backstepping Control Design of Supercavitating Vehicle with Time Delay based on State Observer

The supercavitating vehicle is enveloped in a cavity, which greatly reduces the resistance and increases speed. However, the tail of the vehicle may collide with the cavity wall, resulting in a planing force. At the same time, due to the time-delay effect of cavity, the planing force has strong nonlinear and time-delay characteristics, which increases the difficulty of design of controller. Aiming at the problem of supercavitating vehicle with time delay, the mathematical model of the vehicle was changed into a cascade model. The state observer was designed to estimate the system state, and the backstepping method was used to design the controller which enabled the system to track the desired depth command. The simulation results show the effectiveness of this method.