Kinematics Motion Control of an Underactuated Vehicle: a 3D Solution with Bounded Control Effort

This paper addresses the problem of motion control in three-dimensional space for underactuated autonomous underwater robots. A guidance motion control law that guarantees bounded velocity commands is derived at the kinematics level. The main difference with respect to the other approaches known in the literature is to be found in the definition of the error variables to be driven to zero. Besides the theoretical proof of error convergence to zero, simulation results are reported.