A Proof of Concept for the Guidance of 3D Underactuated Vehicles Subject to Constant Unknown Disturbances

A guidance control law is designed for an underactuated 3D kinematics model of an underwater vehicle subject to constant, but unknown currents. The model captures the main features of most available Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). The paper focuses on the description of the design criteria that allows to explicitly address the difficulties related to the underactuated structure of the model. A convergence and stability proof is sketched and numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the performances of the proposed solution.