Prescribed-Time Tracking Control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

An uncertain ocean environment is a huge challenge for tracking control of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) because the unknown external disturbance degrades the control performance. Motivated by this point, this paper proposes prescribed-time tracking control (PTC) with adaptive disturbance observer (ADO) for 4-DOF autonomous underwater vehicles, which ensures trajectory tracking convergence time within the range of a prescribed time under such an uncertain environment. By coupling a settling time function to construct prescribed-time transformation into the Lyapunov function and introducing a new transformed error, the convergence of the system error is provable. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.