Discrete-Time Position Control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle under Noisy Conditions

Abstract

This paper deals with the discrete-time position control problem for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) under noisy conditions. Due to underwater noise, the velocity measurements returned by the AUV’s on-board sensors afford low accuracy, downgrading its control quality. Additionally, most of the hydrodynamic parameters of the AUV model are uncertain, further degrading the AUV control accuracy. Based on these findings, a discrete-time control law that improves the position control for the AUV trajectory tracking is presented to reduce the impact of these two factors. The proposed control law extends the Ensemble Kalman Filter and solves the problem of the traditional Ensemble Kalman Filter that underperforms when the hydrodynamic parameters of the AUV model are uncertain. The effectiveness of the proposed discrete-time controller is tested on various simulated scenarios and the results demonstrate that the proposed controller has appealing precision for AUV position tracking under noisy conditions and hydrodynamic parameter uncertainty. The proposed controller outperforms the conventional time-delay controller in root-mean-square error by a percentage range of approximately 72.1–97.4% and requires at least 89.5% less average calculation time than the conventional model predictive control.