A new method of path following control of AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle)

Pointing out at the beginning of the full paper what we believe to be the merits and shortcomings of Refs.3 through 6, we propose deriving a new control law for steering an AUV along a predefined path. With the help of Fig.2 in subsection 2.1, which is the schematic of line of sight (LOS) guidance, subsection 2.1 gives eq.(17) to calculate the navigation angle ψ_c shown in Fig.2. Subsection 2.2 derives eq.(22) as the new path following control law and proves its convergence. Section 3 simulates the path following control of a certain AUV. The simulation results, given in Figs.5 through 7 in the full paper, show preliminarily that the AUV navigated with our new method cruises along the predefined path and that the tracking error converges to zero.