Adaptive Backstepping Heading Control for Wave Glider

Wave glider(WG) is a kind of rigid-flexible coupled marine unmanned aerial vehicle, and accurate heading control is the key to ensuring navigation safety. The complex marine environment in which the wave glider navigates, the nonlinearity of the maneuvering response model, and the difficulty of debugging the control system during navigation are the problems faced by heading control. To this end, an adaptive backstepping control strategy is proposed to improve the accuracy and robustness of heading control. Through numerical simulation, the performance of adaptive backstepping heading control for wave gliders is analyzed under the conditions of no interference and time-varying interference, and it is compared with the traditional PID control strategy. The results show that, with the adaptive inverse stepping control strategy, the heading holding accuracy of the wave glider can reach 0.03deg, and the fastest heading response time can reach 13s, which improves the accuracy by 24%, the response time by 73.34%, and the average absolute error by at least 11.4% compared with the traditional PID control. The simulation results demonstrate that the adaptive backstepping control law is simple to derive and has good tracking performance, response performance, and robustness in wave glider heading control.