Backstepping-based Integral Sliding Mode Control with Time Delay Estimation for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel control method combining backstepping, integral sliding mode control, and time delay estimation to enhance trajectory tracking of autonomous underwater vehicles under uncertain conditions.

Contribution

It proposes a new BS-ISMC-TDE control scheme that effectively estimates disturbances and improves AUV trajectory tracking performance.

Findings

The proposed control outperforms conventional BS-ISMC in simulations.

Adaptive TDE improves disturbance estimation accuracy.

Enhanced robustness against model uncertainties and external disturbances.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to propose a high performance control approach for trajectory tracking of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). However, the controller performance can be affected by the unknown perturbations including model uncertainties and external time-varying disturbances in an undersea environment. To address this problem, a Backstepping-based Integral Sliding Mode Control with Time Delay Estimation (BS-ISMC-TDE) is designed. To improve the performance of a conventional backstepping control algorithm, an Integral Sliding Mode Control (ISMC) approach is adopted in the backstepping design to attenuate the steady-state error. Moreover, an adaptive Time Delay Estimation (TDE) strategy is proposed to provide an estimation of perturbations by observing the inputs and the states of the AUV one step into the past without an exact knowledge of the dynamics and the upper bound of uncertainties. From the simulation results, it is shown that the proposed control approach using both adaptive and conventional TDE parts outperforms a Backstepping-based Integral Sliding Mode Control (BS-ISMC).