Cascaded adaptive control of ocean vehicles with significant actuator dynamics

This paper presents a cascade adaptive control scheme for marine vehicles where the non-linear equations of motion include a model of the actuator dynamics. The adaptive controller does not require the parameters of the vehicle dynamics and the actuator time constants to be known a priori. Both the velocity and position tracking errors are shown to converge to zero by applying Barbalat's lemma. Global asymptotic stability is proven for the velocity scheme while the position/attitude controller is only proven to be convergent. Furthermore, all parameter estimates are shown to be bounded. Computer simulations of an ROV speed control system and an autopilot for automatic ship steering are used to illustrate the design methodology