Pure pursuit guidance and sliding mode control of an autonomous underwater vehicle for pipeline tracking

Although pure pursuit guidance law is widely applicable in military sector and for guidance of aerial robots, however it is less addressed in the field of guiding underwater vehicles, with a different application of industrial sector. The attempt in this paper is to utilize this guidance method for tracking underwater pipelines which is actually of high importance in oil industry. For this purpose and considering the existence of uncertainties and disturbances under the seas, a robust method should be utilized for controlling underwater vehicles. Therefore in this paper, considering nonlinear dynamics of these vehicles, sliding mode control method is utilized and in order to come close to real conditions and in order to consider the uncertainty of the system, some of the nonlinear factors existing in the dynamics of the modeled system are actually disregarded in the controller and then the created error in the output is compensated with controlling attempts.