LOS Path Following for Underactuated Underwater Vehicle

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a control scheme for path following of underactuated underwater vehicles. In particular, we propose a guidance law based on the the well-known principle of Line of Sight (LOS) guidance that is applicable to path following of any geometric path with known curvature and torsion. A conceptually simple guidance law is obtained by formulating the control problem in the Serret-Frenet coordinate frame. The guidance law generates desired trajectories for the orientation of the vehicle which is used as an input to an underlying tracking controller. A tracking controller is synthesized using integrator backstepping. The obtained results are illustrated with numerical simulations of the HUGIN AUV.