A novel adaptive control law for autonomous underwater vehicles

In this paper a new adaptive control law for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) is presented. Usually, the control laws are designed with respect to a mathematical model expressed either in the earth-fixed frame or in. the vehicle-fixed frame. These two approaches, however, do not take into account the different origin of the effects that can affect the steady state errors: namely, the restoring generalized forces and the ocean current. With the use of a suitable adaptive action those effects can be properly taken into account as will be shown in this paper.