Underwater Vehicle Autopilots With Adaptive Dynamic Surface Control

This paper presents an overview of the state-of-the-art for underwater vehicle autopilots. We start by reviewing reference frames, vehicle states, typical control surfaces, equations of motion, the different coefficients and how they are obtained, and disturbance models as well. We then consider different possible configurations for the autopilot, including decoupled lateral and longitudinal loops, maneuver and waypoint control. Adaptive dynamic surface control of nonlinear tracking of a single underwater vehicle is designed with the corroboration with numerical simulations. Finally, we describe current hardware implementations for autonomous underwater vehicles.