Time-Delay Controller Design for Position Control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Under Disturbances

This paper presents an enhanced time-delay controller (TDC) for the position control of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) under disturbances. A conventional TDC performs well when the involved data acquisition rate is fast. However, in AUV control applications that use a Doppler velocity log (DVL) navigation system, we cannot keep the data acquisition rate sufficiently fast because a DVL sensor generally supplies data at a slow acquisition rate, which degrades the performance of the TDC. To overcome this problem, we propose an integral sliding-mode controller to be supplemented to the conventional TDC to improve the control precision even if the DVL navigation system is in operation. The proposed controller is computationally simple and robust to unmodeled dynamics and disturbances. We performed computer simulations and experiments with the Cyclops AUV to demonstrate the validity of the proposed controller.