Robust Dynamic Inversion based on Sliding Mode Control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

In this paper, the robust dynamic inversion (RDI) control strategy based on sliding mode control (SMC) is proposed. Dynamic inversion (DI) is a control method that forces the system states to track the user-defined desired dynamics by cancelling the inherent dynamics. However, achieving a perfect cancellation of the original dynamics is impossible in real applications due to uncertainties, such as disturbances, noises, model uncertainties etc. So robustness issues must be considered in designing DI controller. Different from the previous works of achieving robustness in the DI controller, the proposed RDI controller is designed based on SMC which is inherently robust. Numerical simulations with application to an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.