A Collision-Free Planning and Control Framework for a Biomimetic Underwater Vehicle in Dynamic Environments

In this article, a collision-free planning and control framework for a biomimetic underwater vehicle (BUV) in dynamic environments is presented. It consists of obstacle avoidance planning, arctangent nonsingularity terminal sliding mode (ANTSM) control, and fuzzy inference. A fuzzy artificial potential field with a velocity component is designed for obstacle avoidance planning. An ANTSM controller with an arctangent function is proposed to guarantee a shorter convergence time of system states. The stability of the system is analyzed by the Lyapunov theory. A fuzzy inference module is given to construct the nonlinear relationship between the control parameters of the flippers and force/torque. Finally, comparative simulations, robot operating system-based simulations, and underwater obstacle avoidance experiments of the BUV in a swimming pool are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed collision-free planning and control algorithm.