Surface Tracking Controls of an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle with Fixed Sonar Ray Measurements in Tunnel-Like Environments

This paper introduces 3-D surface tracking control of an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) in tunnel-like environments. Consider the case where a sonar transducer in the UUV does not rotate, and it only emits fixed sonar ray reporting a simple distance measurement. This reduces the power consumption of the UUV, while reducing the UUV’s size and price. The UUV is controlled to proceed in tunnel-like environments, while maintaining a predefined distance from the tunnel boundaries. For maintaining a predefined distance from tunnel boundaries, the UUV uses fixed sonar rays surrounding it. As far as we know, our article is novel in developing 3-D surface tracking controls of tunnel-like environments utilizing an UUV with fixed sonar rays surrounding it. MATLAB simulations are used for demonstrating the performance of the proposed tracking controls.