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This paper deals with the trajectory tracking problem of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in the presence of dynamic uncertainties and time-varying external disturbances. Three exponentially convergent robust controllers, namely, the min-max type controller, the saturation type controller and the smooth transition type controller are proposed to drive an AUV to track a predefined trajectory. It is shown that the filtered tracking errors, position tracking errors and velocity tracking errors for the three proposed controllers are exponentially convergent. Moreover, all the above tracking errors for the three proposed controllers can be shaped by specific analytic expressions and such expressions illustrate how the transient responses of the above tracking errors can be modified by adjusting the control parameters. The characteristics of the three proposed controllers are summarized and demonstrated with numerical simulations. Theoretical comparison analysis and comparative simulations with the existing RISE-based controller of AUV are presented to show the effectiveness of the three proposed exponentially convergent robust controllers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to develop a novel path following control law for nonlinear vessel models in two-time scales. For the 4-DOF path following model, we explore that the guidance dynamics are much slower than the ship motion dynamics. Based on such characteristic, a singular perturbation method is used to decompose the full system into two-time-scale subsystems. The two-time-scale structure allows independent analysis of dynamics in each time scale. Separate control strategies for the quasi-steady-state subsystem and the boundary layer subsystem are designed to stabilize the full system, yielding a rudder angle control law which is compact and uncomplicated to implement in practice. Singular perturbation methods are utilized to provide mathematical expressions for the upper bound of the singularly perturbed parameter and establish the exponential stability of the full system. The paper proves that the control law is robust in the presence of bounded perturbations and unmodeled dynamics, resulting states converge into an invariant set arbitrarily closed to the origin. Simulation results show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method for path following. The primary benefit of the proposed method is the simplicity of implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental disturbances and systematical uncertainties are the main obstacles for ship motion control. This paper devotes to enhancing the control system robustness of underactuated surface ships with model uncertainties and environmental disturbances. A novel nonlinear robust adaptive scheme with sliding mode control is proposed for underactuated ships to track the desired path generated by the logical virtual ship in the presence of unknown plant parameters and environmental disturbances. Compared with the existing results, the proposed controller is designed based on the combination of PI sliding mode control and the upper bound estimation of disturbances. With the proposed design, the control scheme could not only obtain a better performance of the control system, the continuous scheme also reduce the chattering of system by a special construction of the sliding manifolds. Numerical simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]