Path following control of fully-actuated autonomous underwater vehicle in presence of fast-varying disturbances

This paper presents an improved active disturbances rejecter control (ADRC) for path following control of autonomous underwater vehicles under significant fast-varying disturbances caused by waves and sea currents. Two significant and efficient improvements are introduced to the traditional ADRC in order to accomplish this task. First, a generalized ESO (GESO) and Harmonic ESO (HESO) were designed to achieve a high disturbances estimation quality. Secondly, two AUV path following controllers based on ADRC-GESO and ADRC-HESO were designed to ensure a high performance tracking in presence of periodic-type disturbances. Finally, numerical simulations were performed and the obtained results showed very significant enhancements of robustness and tracking accuracy by the proposed methods compared to conventional ADRC.