Hierarchical visual servoing for pose regulation of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles based on active disturbance rejection control

This paper presents a novel hierarchical homography-based visual servo control strategy for pose regulation of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The proposed approach separates kinematic and dynamic control loops to effectively manage visual feedback, nonholonomic constraints, and dynamic uncertainties, enhancing system flexibility. The kinematic loop uses pure image information for motion guidance, employing homography decomposition for yaw angle calculation and refining translational errors. A σ-scaling technique is applied to deal with the nonholonomic constraints. Then a switching visual stabilization controller generates reference velocities for the AUV. The dynamic loop employs active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) to estimate and compensate for total disturbances (dynamic uncertainties and random water flow disturbances), ensuring robust velocity tracking under stochastic conditions. Physical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in completing visual stabilization tasks of AUVs under dynamic uncertainties and nonholonomic constraints.