Tracking Control for a Dynamic Model of an Underwater Submersible
For underwater robotics, this provides a principled energy-based tracking control method for fully coupled vehicle dynamics.
The paper proposes a novel error function that yields Hamiltonian error dynamics for underwater vehicles, enabling an energy-based tracking controller. Asymptotic convergence is proved and demonstrated on a BlueROV2 model.
Underwater vehicles are naturally modelled as rigid bodies on SE(3) subjected to added mass effects. The passivity of the Hamiltonian structure of the system can be exploited to design energy-based stabilising controllers, however, the extension of these control designs to tracking control is not trivial since the error system for the classical error formulations is not itself Hamiltonian. In this paper, we show that a novel choice of error function leads to error dynamics that are Hamiltonian. We go on to derive an energy-based tracking control for a fully coupled model of a submersible vehicle. Asymptotic convergence of the control scheme is proved and the control is demonstrated in a simulation study of the Blue Robotics BlueROV2 Heavy submersible.