Adaptive sliding mode controller design for a supercavitating vehicle

Supercavitating vehicles have special characteristics from traditional underwater vehicles because of supercavitation. The motion of the vehicle tends to be unstable, and the dynamics of it is nonlinear and strongly coupled. Due to the time-varying factors, delay-dependent behavior and unmodeled dynamics of system, a simplified model is developed. For the supercavitating vehicle with the mismatched uncertainties, continuous sliding mode controller is designed, with an adaptive technology which is used to estimate the unknown upper bound of mismatched uncertainties. Meanwhile, upper bound of parameter uncertainties is not required. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the controller designed in the paper.