Steering Control of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle using SMC Techniques

This paper presents the problem of steering control for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). A six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) system of coupled equations of motion of an AUV is first decoupled as a lateral model to control steering angle of an AUV. Sliding Mode Control (SMC) technique is used to stabilize the system and track a constant reference yaw angle in presence of model perturbations and uncertainties. Using numerical simulations, it is shown that the closed-loop system under the proposed control scheme is stable and the tracking error converges to zero in presence of model perturbations and uncertainties.