Application of the sliding mode fuzzy controller to the guidance and control of an autonomous underwater vehicle

Shows that a sliding mode fuzzy controller is quite satisfactory for the control and line of sight tracking performance of an autonomous underwater vehicle. The design method of the sliding mode fuzzy controller allows a systematic method to construct a set of membership functions, called shrinking-span membership functions and dilating-span membership functions, for a specific linguistic variable. This gives the controller design more convenience to deal with nonlinearities of the vehicle dynamics and the environmental disturbances. Effects of using different design parameters are evaluated through experiments.