Design of an adaptive nonlinear controller for depth control of an autonomous underwater vehicle

This paper presents an adaptive nonlinear controller for diving control of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). So far, diving dynamics of an AUV has often been derived under various assumptions on the motion of the vehicle. Typically, the pitch angle of AUV has been assumed to be small in the diving plane. However, these kinds of assumptions may induce large modeling errors and further may cause severe problems in many practical applications. In this paper, through a certain simple modification, we break the above restricting condition on the vehicle’s pitch angle in diving motion so that the vehicle could take free pitch motion. Proposed adaptive nonlinear controller is designed by using a traditional backstepping method. Finally, certain numerical studies are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of proposed control scheme, and some practical features of the control law are also discussed. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.