Planar trajectory planning and tracking control design for underactuated AUVs

This paper addresses the combined problem of trajectory planning and tracking control for underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) on the horizontal plane. Given a smooth, inertial, 2D reference trajectory, the planning algorithm uses vehicle dynamics to compute the reference orientation and body-fixed velocities. Using these, the error dynamics are obtained. These are stabilized using backstepping techniques, forcing the tracking error to an arbitrarily small neighborhood of zero. Simulation results for a constant velocity trajectory, i.e. a circle, and a time-varying velocity one, i.e. a sinusoidal path, are presented. The parametric robustness is considered and it is shown that tracking remains satisfactory.