Underwater cable tracking control of under-actuated AUV

In this paper, a cascaded framework including simplified cable localization method with magnetic sensing and robust tracking control algorithm is proposed in order to guide a three-degrees-of-freedom (3-DOF) under-actuated autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to autonomously track the underwater cable. With the magnetic sensing, the cable tracking control is constructed as a straight-line path following control problem in the horizontal plane. A simplified magnetic line-of-sight (LOS) guidance is built based on the relative geometric relationship between the AUV and the cable, and a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller based on the feedback linearizing technique is adopted to robustly track the desired guidance profiles, such that the under-actuated AUV exposed to constant current disturbances is able to move towards the underwater cable and then inspect its buried environment. Finally, numerical simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed control system on the cable tracking and inspection.