State feedback control of an underwater vehicle for wall following

Wall following consists in navigating at a constant distance and orientation from a certain surface to be inspected. This task is required in many applications of underwater vehicles (e.g. ship hull or hydraulic dam inspection). We propose a nonlinear state feedback, designed for a specific embedded acoustic sensing system. The proposed method and the associated sensor can work on very small low cost underwater vehicles at high sampling rates. Sensor experiments show the ability of a single beam transducer to detect both distance and orientation of a wall, while simulation results show how this sensing system can be successfully integrated in a nonlinear state feedback controller to perform autonomous wall following with an underwater vehicle, even with disturbances.