Integrated guidance and control strategy for homing of unmanned underwater vehicles

This paper presents a novel integrated guidance and control strategy for homing of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) in 5-degree-of-freedom (DOF), where the vehicles are assumed to be underactuated at high speed and required to move towards the final docking path. During the initial homing stage, the guidance system is first designed by geometrical analysis method to generate a feasible reference trajectory. Then, in the backstepping framework, the proposed trajectory tracking controller can achieve all the tracking errors in the closed-loop system convergence to a small neighbourhood of zero. It means that the vehicle's dynamics are consistent with the reference trajectory derived in the previous step. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed guidance and control strategy, the complete stability analysis used Lyapunov's method is given in the paper, and simulation results of all initial conditions are presented and discussed. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Franklin Institute.