Sliding mode tracking control of autonomous underwater vehicles with the effect of quantization

This paper develops a trajectory tracking control law for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with the effect of states and control input quantization. A sliding mode control (SMC) scheme is proposed to conquer the quantization effect by introducing the bound of quantization error into the switching term of the SMC. A finite-time disturbance observer is proposed to observe the unknown time-varying disturbances. The stability analysis demonstrates that the designed tracking controller can force the AUV to track the reference trajectory and guarantee the asymptotic stability of the closed system. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method.