Underactuated AUV Path Following Control Based on Adaptive Backstepping Method

In this paper, the adaptive backstepping method is used to construct the controller of the underactuated autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to realize its path following control. First, in the kinematics layer, the line-of-sight (LOS) guidance law is used to transform the two-dimensional path tracking into heading tracking, and then in the dynamics layer, the speed controller and the heading controller are designed to satisfy Lyapunov stability by using the adaptive backstepping method. Finally, the proposed control algorithm is deployed on REMUS-100 AUV to carry out simulation experiments of straight line path following and two-dimensional circular path following. The results show that the method has excellent performance in both error convergence speed and accuracy.