Position Tracking Control of Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles With Communication Delay

Many marine missions demand a single remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) or multiple ROVs to achieve position tracking. However, the time-varying communication delay in water makes it challenging to achieve the tracking task. This paper is concerned with single-vehicle tracking and multi-vehicle tracking problems. With the consideration of time-varying communication delay, two model-free proportional-derivative (PD) tracking controllers are designed. For the proposed controllers, Lyapunov-Krasovskii functions are constructed to analyze the stability, and then sufficient conditions for asymptotic stability are presented. In particular, the relationship between controller gains and time delay is established by using linear matrix inequality (LMI), such that the allowable upper bound of time delay can be calculated. Finally, simulation and experiment results are performed to validate the effectiveness.