Dynamic State Feedback Control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Based on Switching Between Multiple Heading Movement Models

The heading motion control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) plays an essential role in their underwater operation process. However, AUV heading motion is a strongly coupled, complex, and nonlinear system, which leads to the control strategy design difficulty. To simplify the control strategy design process, the heading motion model is decomposed into two submodels. Each submodel adopts different dynamic state feedback controllers, whose feedback control parameters change with the surge velocity to dampen the effect of surge velocity on the heading motion, because of the strong coupling and mutual interference between the heading motion and surge velocity of AUV systems. In addition, a dynamic weighted switching control method is proposed for smoothly increasing or decreasing the state vector dimensions of the two submodels based on their characteristics. The switching control method also avoids the unstable phenomenon during high surge speeds. The stability of each submodel and the corresponding switching strategy are proved theoretically based on the common Lyapunov stability criterion. Lake trials demonstrated that the advised control method could dampen the coupling effect of surge velocities on the AUV's heading motion.