Résumé
During sea missions, underwater vehicles are exposed to changes in the parameters of the system and subject to persistent external disturbances due to the ocean current influence. These issues make the design of a robust controller a quite challenging task. This paper focuses on the design of a adaptive high order sliding mode control for trajectory tracking on an underwater vehicle. The main feature of the developed control law is that it preserves the advantages of robust control, it does not need the knowledge of the upper bound of the disturbance and easy tuning in real applications. Using Lyapunov concept, asymptotic stability of the closed-loop tracking system is ensured. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller for trajectory tracking in depth and yaw dynamics are demonstrated through real-time experiments.