Tracking Control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles with Internal Moving Mass

The trajectory-tracking control problem is investigated for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) moving in the vertical plane using an internal point mass and a rear thruster as actuators. Combined with the dynamics of the point mass, the AUV is modeled as an underactuated system. A Lyapunov-based tracking controller is proposed by using backstepping approach to stabilize the error dynamics and force the position errors to a small neighborhood of the origin. Simulation results validate the proposed tracking approach.