Position and attitude control of an underactuated autonomous underwater vehicle

The paper considers control of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) with a reduced number of actuators. A nonlinear model describing both the dynamics and the kinematics of an AUV is studied. A continuous periodic time-varying feedback law is presented. It is shown that it exponentially stabilizes the total AUV model using only four actuators. Furthermore, it is shown that if the hydrodynamic restoring forces in roll are large enough, the AUV is exponentially stabilized by this feedback law using only three actuators. Simulation results are presented