Accurate track control of unmanned underwater vehicle under complex disturbances

  Objectives  This paper presents a non-singular terminal sliding mode track control method based on a finite-time disturbance observer to solve the problem of accurately tracking and controlling an the 3D trajectory of an unmanned underwater vehicle under complex external disturbances.

  Methods  A non-singular terminal sliding mode track controller is designed to ensure that the tracking error converges to zero accurately within a limited time. A finite-time disturbance observer is designed to improve the anti-jamming ability of the system under external multidimensional time-varying disturbances.

  Results  The Lyapunov function is used to prove that the designed control strategy can remain stable for a limited time. MATLAB is used for the simulation experiment, and a comparison with the backstepping sliding mode control method under step disturbance shows that the method presented in this paper achieves accurate trajectory tracking.

  Conclusions  The results of this paper can provide a solution for accurately tracking the 3D trajectories of unmanned underwater vehicles.