A new fuzzy SMC control approach to path tracking of autonomous underwater vehicles with mismatched disturbances

This work proposed a new sliding mode control (SMC) scheme is for path tracking of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) with uncertainties and mismatched disturbances. Considering the complexity of parameter tuning, fuzzy system based gain-scheduling scheme is designed to deal with the system tuning. In the control system, mismatched disturbances and uncertainties are estimated and assessed by disturbance observer(DOB) and radial basis function neural networks (RBFNN), respectively. Additionally, the condition of Lyapunov stability is analyzed here to ensure the closed-loop stability of the control system. This control scheme can be applied to path tracking of AUV in different driving environment within fast-changing trajectories. Finally, many comparative experiments have been conducted to show the favorable performance of the proposed controller.