Backstepping-Based Tracking Control of Underactuated Aquatic Robots

Increased interest in the use of autonomous aquatic robots in a variety of applications has led to the need for efficient and precise control of these robots. In particular, accurate trajectory control has become of importance in many of these applications. However, the highly nonlinear and underactuated dynamics of many aquatic robots present significant challenges in control. In this work, we propose a trajectory-tracking control approach for a general class of underactuated aquatic robotic systems undergoing planar motion. We demonstrate how a backstepping-based control scheme can be synthesized to ultimately bound three tracking errors (2-D position and orientation), despite the underactuated nature of the system. Via multi-time-scale analysis of singularly perturbed systems, we prove how the control scheme achieves boundedness and convergence of the tracking errors to a neighborhood of the origin. Finally, we implement the proposed scheme on a robotic fish and demonstrate its efficacy via experimental results. This article is complemented with a video: https://youtu.be/7007tUQd3KI.