A novel intelligent RISE feedback control of autonomous tethered underwater vehicles: Design & real-time experiments

This paper deals with the tracking control problem of small autonomous tethered underwater vehicles. It proposes a new extended robust integral of the sign of the error (RISE) feedback control. The proposed RISE-based extension benefits from a fuzzy inference system to automatically and online tune the parameters of the RISE controller. The resulting intelligent control scheme is named Fuzzy RISE (FRISE) feedback control. Several real-time experimental scenarios, in different operating conditions, were conducted on Leonard underwater vehicle to demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed control scheme. It was also compared with some existing controllers from the literature to show its performances. •A new intelligent RISE feedback control of autonomous tethered underwater vehicles is proposed.•A nominal RISE feedback control is enhanced based on a fuzzy logic inference system.•The resulting intelligent RISE is validated in real-time experiments on Leonard AUV.•Real-time experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller w.r.t existing controllers, namely a PID and a conventional RISE controller.