Region tracking control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

The paper investigates region tracking control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). A novel region tracking controller is proposed to drive AUV's position tracking error in each instant into the predefined sphere region. It is realized by constructing a continuous and differentiable piecewise function firstly, and then by designing a virtual variable based on Euclidean norm and fractional power of position tracking error. The stability of the closed-loop system and region-reaching of tracking errors are analyzed based on Lyapunov theory and Barbalat's lemma. Finally, the proposed approach is employed to an AUV for tacking two kinds of trajectories. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.