Diving control of underactuated unmanned undersea vehicle using integral-fast terminal sliding mode control

The problem of diving control for an underactuated unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV) considering the presence of parameters perturbations and wave disturbances was addressesed. The vertical motion of an UUV was divided into two noninteracting subsystems for surge velocity control and diving. To stabilize the vertical motion system, the surge velocity and the depth control controllers were proposed using backstepping technology and an integral-fast terminal sliding mode control (IFTSMC). It is proven that the proposed control scheme can guarantee that all the error signals in the whole closed-loop system globally converge to the sliding surface in finite time and asymptotically converge to the origin along the sliding surface. With a unified control parameters for different motion states, a series of numerical simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the above designed control scheme, which also shows strong robustness against parameters perturbations and wave disturbances.