3DOF Adaptive Line-Of-Sight Based Proportional Guidance Law for Path Following of AUV in the Presence of Ocean Currents

In order to achieve high-precision path following of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) in the horizontal plane, a three degrees-of-freedom adaptive line-of-sight based proportional (3DOFAPLOS) guidance law is proposed. Firstly, the path point coordinate system is introduced, which is suitable for the conversion of an arbitrary path. Then, the appropriate look-ahead distance is obtained by an improved adaptive line-of-sight (ALOS) according to three degrees-of-freedom (3DOF), including the cross-track error, the curvature of reference path, and the forward speed. Moreover, combining three degrees-of-freedom ALOS (3DOFALOS) with proportional guidance law, the desired heading is calculated considering the drift angle. 3DOFAPLOS has two functions: in the convergence stage, 3DOFALOS plays a leading role, making AUV converge to the path more quickly and smoothly. In the guidance stage, proportional guidance law plays a major role in effectively resisting the influence of drift angle and making AUV sail along the reference path. If the path is curved, 3DOFALOS makes contributions in both stages, adjusting look-ahead distance in real time with respect to curvature. The stability of the designed closed system is proved by Lyapunov theory. Both simulation and experiment results have verified that 3DOFAPLOS has a satisfactory result, which improves tracking performance more than 50% compared with the traditional line-of-sight (LOS). Specifically, the mean average error (MAE) of path following under 3DOFAPLOS can be reduced by about 60%, and the root mean square error (RMSE) can be reduced by about 50% compared with LOS.