930 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 16, NO.
5, SEPTEMBER 2008
Model-Based Output Feedback Control of
Slender-Body Underactuated AUVs:
Theory and Experiments
Jon E. Refsnes, Asgeir J. Sørensen, and Kristin Y. Pettersen, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—This paper presents the design and experimental
results of a novel output feedback controller for slender-body
underwater vehicles. The controller is derived using model-based
design techniques. Two separate control plant models are em-
ployed: a 3-degree-of-freedom (DOF) current-induced vessel
model accounting for the current loads acting on the vehicle
and a 5-DOF model describing the vehicle dynamics. The main
design objective behind this strategy is to incorporate the vehicle
dynamics when estimating the current influence on the vehicle.
Furthermore, the transit model is based on the notion of constant
propeller revolution resulting in a partly linearized model, which
subsequently leads to perspicuous and implementable controller
and observer structures. The controller is derived using the ob-
server backstepping technique, and the closed loop is proved to
be asymptotically stable using Lyapunov and cascaded systems
theory. The control objective is to track the desired pitch and
heading angle generated by the line-of-sight guidance system while
keeping constant forward thrust. Experimental results demon-
strate successful performance of the proposed output feedback
controller implemented on the Minesniper MkII AUV/ROV.
Index Terms—Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), experi-
mental results, nonlinear model-based output feedback control.
I. INTRODUCTION
OR underwater vehicles, moving with some forward
F speed, the dynamics are highly nonlinear and coupled.
This presents control challenges that have led to considerable
interest on nonlinear observer and controller design for un-
derwater vehicles during the last decades. There are, however,
relatively few reported results on model-based control (MBC)
designs for underwater vehicles that include experimental tests.
The main reason for this lies probably in the great difficulties in
obtaining an accurate model of the vessels. Furthermore, unpre-
dictable current loads and poor position measurements present
challenges when employing MBC due to their potentially strong
influence on the controller. For these reasons, in addition to
Manuscript received June 7, 2007; revised August 21, 2007. Manuscript
received in final form January 7, 2007. Published July 30, 2008 (projected).
Recommended by Associate Editor F. Caccavale. This work was supported by
the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Kongsberg ASA,
Norway.
J. E. Refsnes and A. J. Sørensen are with the Department of Marine Tech-
nology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491 Trondheim,
Norway (e-mail: jon.refsnes@marin.ntnu.no; asgeir.sorensen@ntnu.no).
K. Y. Pettersen is with the Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Nor-
wegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway
(e-mail: kristin.y.pettersen@itk.ntnu.no).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCST.2007.916347
1063-6536/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE
issues related to the actual implementation, tuning, and debug-
ging, nonmodel-based solutions are often preferred. There are,
however, important advantages that can follow from employing
MBC. Based on the model, one can predict the motion of the
vehicle by using controller actuator inputs and available state
measurements. Moreover, a model-based observer can provide
estimates of unmeasured states in addition to filtering of noisy
signals. This paper presents successful results of an MBC
system of a slender-body underwater vehicle, demonstrating
orientation tracking, estimation of unmeasured states, filtering,
and dead reckoning. We will, in this paper, denote the model
that is designed for the purpose of control design as the control
plant model (CPM). A CPM is, according to [31], defined as
a model that captures the main characteristics of the physical
system. Unfortunately, poorly formulated CPMs that do not
capture the important characteristics of the dynamic system
may cause reduced performance and also stability problems.
Hence, when deriving the CPM, emphasis should be placed on
stability and robustness issues related to the system in addition
to simplifying the model such that analysis is feasible. We will
thus, in this paper, describe the development of the dynamic
model and explain the most important hydrodynamic features
of slender-body autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The
more complex process plant model (PPM) is a comprehensive
description of the actual process and should be as detailed as
needed. The main purpose of this model is to simulate the real
plant and to test controllers and observers that are designed
based on the corresponding CPM.
A. Background
There are some reported results on MBC of AUVs in the
literature. In [16], a state feedback controller is proposed for
tracking of the NPS ARIES AUV. The model is linearized about
a constant forward velocity and decoupled into three separate
systems: surge, horizontal steering (sway and yaw), and the
diving system (heave and pitch). Sliding-mode controllers
and observers [9] are proposed to solve the tracking problem.
Experimental results, reported in [22], demonstrate successful
controller performance. The NPS ARIES is an underactuated
slender-body AUV intended for orientation tracking while
maintaining some forward speed. This kind of streamlined
AUVs should be distinguished from open box-framed vehi-
cles. These are low-speed vehicles, usually fully actuated,
and with hydrodynamic and stability properties that may vary
significantly. In [30], a model-based positioning system is
proposed for robotic vehicles where experimental evaluation
REFSNES et al.: MODEL-BASED OUTPUT FEEDBACK CONTROL OF SLENDER-BODY UNDERACTUATED AUVs
of the different controllers is performed on the JHRUROV
vehicle. The proposed model is completely decoupled, and
the hydrodynamics are dominated by linear and nonlinear
damping, i.e., the Coriolis forces are not explicitly included
in the model. The paper concludes that fixed model-based
controllers outperform the PD controller. However, according
to [30], the performance is greatly degraded when employing
incorrect model parameters. In [34], experimental study on
tracking of the open frame vehicle ODIN is presented. Al-
though employed on a nonlinear model of the ODIN vehicle,
the reported controller is a linear PID controller. Hence, it is not
model-based since it does not incorporate the model dynamics
in the controller. Nevertheless, the controller provides good
tracking results. In [30] and [34], velocity measurements are
available for feedback. Successful tracking results of an MBC
derived using the backstepping theory are presented in [2].
The vehicle, an open-frame hovercraft, is descried by a three
DOF horizontal model without nonlinear damping. All these
mentioned results have in common that the velocity is available
for feedback, and all, except [2], assume that the destabilizing
Coriolis forces are dominated by the hydrodynamic damping in
some sense. Comparing with low-speed applications for ships,
e.g., dynamic positioning [21], this is a common approach for
control plant modeling. Moreover, the hydrodynamic properties
of a box shaped vehicle indicates that the damping is dominant,
and that the hydrodynamic Coriolis forces are negligible. How-
ever, for slender-body vehicles with some forward speed, this
assumption is not realistic.
The work presented in this paper is motivated by the Mines-
niper MkII developed by Kongsberg ASA. The AUV/ROV is
a low-cost, torpedo-shaped underwater vehicle. The relatively
small weight compared to the nominal speed implies that the
dynamics are speed dominant and that the nonlinear character-
istics of the hydrodynamics become decisive. Moreover, due to
cost reasons, this generation of the Minesniper does not carry
any velocity or inertial measurement units (IMU). The position
is measured by using a short base line acoustical measurement
system. The sensor suite also provides measurements of the
heading, pitch, roll, and depth. This restriction in the instrumen-
tation contributes to increased challenges for accurate tracking.
Therefore, to improve the performance, we propose an observer
providing position and velocity estimates. For underwater vehi-
cles, speed measurements can be obtained by using Doppler Ve-
locity Log (DVL) [19] or by integrating accelerations measured
by the IMU. However, the DVL can only generate accurate ve-
locity measurements provided that the distance to the seafloor
is within a certain boundary. Furthermore, IMUs are subject
to drift in the derived velocity when integrating faulty accel-
eration measurements. Consequently, the output feedback con-
troller proposed in this paper may also improve the performance
for slender-body vehicles with more sophisticated sensor suites
since the proposed observer and controller may work indepen-
dently of these velocity measurements, and thus contribute to
increased reliability of the control system by providing analyt-
ical redundancy to the measurements. This makes the system
more tolerant to faults.
In underwater applications, the ocean current has severe in-
fluence on the vehicle performance, and the current influence
931
is difficult to predict even though measurements of both vehicle
and water velocity are available. Therefore, a common approach
is to model the disturbance as a constant, or slowly varying bias,
see, e.g., [34] and [14]. A drawback of this method is that the hy-
drodynamic properties of the vehicle are not properly accounted
for when modeling the current loads. Other reported methods in-
volve using kinematics and filtering techniques to obtain an es-
timate of the current velocity. Examples of this can be seen in,
e.g., [5], [3], and [4], in which all require velocity feedback of
some kind. In this paper, we will employ the modeling approach
first introduced in [26] and more thoroughly described in [29].
A 3-degree-of-freedom (DOF) model in surge, sway, and heave
is derived to serve as a foundation for current observer design.
This is a current-induced vessel model that can be interpreted as
a third-order filter with constants obtained based on the vehicle
parameters. The goal is to provide an estimate of the current
velocity and thereby estimate the influence of the current loads
on the vehicle. With this approach, the key hydrodynamic prop-
erties are taken into account when estimating the effect of the
environmental disturbance, since the estimated current velocity
is explicitly used in calculation of the nonlinear hydrodynamic
damping and Coriolis forces. Furthermore, since only the orien-
tation, and in particular the position, which can be contaminated
by severe noise, are measured, a higher order model is preferred
in order to avoid large jumps and oscillations in the current es-
timate. Successful experimental results of this observer concept
can be found in [27] which reports the design of a three DOF
current-induced vessel model coworking with a complete non-
linear six DOF vehicle model. An output controller has not yet
been tested with the observers in [27]. This paper adds to the
results on output feedback control presented in [29] since we
in this paper consider the case where velocity measurements
are not available, and in addition, this paper presents the results
from experimental tests carried out on a full-scale vehicle in the
ocean.
In this paper, we consider underactuated AUVs, a vehicle
property which often complicates the overall analysis. In [10]
and [3], the guidance kinematics algorithms are included in the
controller derivation. This makes it possible to prove conver-
gence to the desired path despite the lack of control actuators.
We use a slightly different approach in this paper by considering
the desired trajectories as external, time-varying, and bounded
signals. This contributes to relatively simple solutions for the
observer-controller design. We then show that the unactuated
states are bounded due to hydrodynamic damping by analyzing
the inherent dynamics of the proposed controller. This approach
was first introduced in [13], and it is a convenient tool which
follows from using the backstepping method [20]. The three-di-
mensional guidance system is based on the line-of-sight method,
which has been thoroughly described and analyzed in the liter-
ature; see, e.g., [7] and [8].
B. Main Contribution and Paper Outline
The main contribution of this paper is the following. The de-
sign and results of a guidance and control system for slender-
body underactuated AUVs measuring only position, depth, and
orientation. The control objective is to track the desired pitch
and heading angles while keeping constant forward thrust. The
932 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 16, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2008
output feedback controller consists of a pair of coworking non-
linear Luenberger observers providing filtering and estimation
of the position, Euler-angles, and the vehicle and current veloc-
ities. The proposed vehicle CPM is semi-linearized; the desta-
bilizing Coriolis forces and moments are linearized about the
relative forward speed when applying constant thruster revolu-
tion. However, nonlinear damping is included. Experimental re-
sults show satisfactory performance of the proposed observers
and controller. Cascaded systems theory is employed to prove
asymptotical stability of the closed loop system. Neither high
gain nor bounded controller feedbacks are required, and the ob-
server and controller gains can be tuned separately. These fea-
tures are convenient for practical implementation. This paper is
an extension to the work presented in [28], displaying all proofs
and also elaborating on the guidance system and the actuator
modeling. An important objective of this work is to develop an
observer-controller system that is easily implementable. Due to
the nonlinear coupling between the three DOF current-induced
vessel model and the five DOF vehicle model, the stability anal-
ysis becomes quite involved, but the resulting observers and
controller are easily implementable.
This paper is organized as follows: A description of the math-
ematical modeling is given in Section II. The observer and con-
troller design and analyses are given in Sections III and IV, re-
spectively. Furthermore, a case study on the Minesniper MkII
is presented in Section V, describing the actuator modeling,
the guidance system, and finally, the experimental results are
shown. Some concluding remarks are given in Section VI.
II. MATHEMATICAL MODELING
The CPMs proposed in this paper are based on the following
six DOF dynamics presented as the PPM in ([12], chap. 4.3) and
[31]
(1a)
(1b)
where and denote
the North-East-down (NED)-frame position/orientation and
body-frame velocities in six DOF, respectively. The relative ve-
locity is given by , where
is the current velocity vector containing the body-fixed
current velocities in surge, sway, and heave. Furthermore,
and are the frame transformation, mass,
rigid-body Coriolis, added mass Coriolis, and damping ma-
trices, respectively. The vectors and capture the restoring
and control forces and moments, respectively. The following
subsections present the corresponding CPMs for the application
considered in this paper.
A. Steady-State Analysis of Surge Motion
The motivation behind this section is to determine the con-
stant about which to linearize the CPMs. We decouple the surge
motion from the rest of the model and study the steady-state be-
havior. This decoupling of the dynamics is a method that has
shown to provide a successful basis for underwater vehicle con-
trol design; see, e.g., [16]. Considering only steady-state, i.e.,
straight line motion, gives the following steady state surge force
equality:
(2)
where represents the linear and nonlinear hydrody-
namic damping. The relative surge velocity is given by
, where and denote the body-fixed vehicle and cur-
rent velocity, respectively. Furthermore, Whitcomb and Yoerger
[33] have presented a quasi-steady approach for mathematical
modeling of thrust which has shown to match the thrusters on
the Minesniper MkII well
(3)
where [rad/s] denotes the propeller revolution, and and
are positive constants. More details regarding the thruster
forces will be presented in Section V-A1. Other common
thruster models for underwater vehicles omit the term propor-
tional to ; see, e.g., [17]. However, full-scale
basin tests of the Minesniper MkII have shown that (3) matches
the actual thruster forces in a satisfactory manner, although
; see Section V. In transit, it is reasonable to determine
a constant propeller revolution which the forward thruster is
operating on. This is mainly because obtaining a certain speed
is of less importance compared to tracking of the orientation
and depth. Therefore, employing constant propeller revolution,
it follows from (2) and (3) that the relative forward velocity
is constant in steady-state , i.e., , where
is a known constant velocity. The reason for this can be
verified by the following: It follows that , this
means that the even though is dependent on the orientation
of the vehicle relative to the current, which is time-varying,
it follows from (2) and (3) that will vary accordingly, such
that the relative velocity remains constant in steady state. This
is valid independently of the vehicle orientation. Note that
is obtained analytically by solving (2) and (3) with respect to
. Inaccuracies in the parameters are equivalent to the effect
of a current which will be estimated by an observer. Hence, a
potential error in the calculated will be automatically com-
pensated for, provided that the observer converge to the actual
state. To illustrate the scenario, Fig. 1 depicts a simulation using
the PPM (1) of the Minesniper MkII performing way-point
tracking in a current. The right plot shows that the relative
forward velocity is the same for all headings, only
slightly varying when changing course direction. Moreover,
note that the vehicle velocity is altering with the heading.
Hence, the modeling approach proposed in this paper is an
extension to the results in which constant forward velocity is
assumed, (i.e., ; see, e.g., [16] and [12, Ch. 13], since the
approach in this paper is also valid when there is ocean currents
present. In this paper, we will consider AUVs in transit where
the forward velocity is larger than the current velocity such that
.
B. Two Separate Systems
The CPM presented in this section is based on the approach
presented in [29]. The key idea is to apply two coworking
REFSNES et al.: MODEL-BASED OUTPUT FEEDBACK CONTROL OF SLENDER-BODY UNDERACTUATED AUVs 933

and
(6)

is the vector containing the gravity and buoyancy moments,

Fig. 1. Simulation with the Minesniper MkII performing way-point tracking.
Left: Horizontal position. Right: Surge velocities u; u and u .
dynamic models: a five DOF vehicle model and a three DOF
current induced vessel model (surge, sway, heave) which cap-
tures the main current loads on the vehicle. When utilizing
this method, the vehicle dynamics are taken into account
when modeling the current loads since the current velocity is
used explicitly in the vehicle model. Furthermore, since we
consider underwater vehicles measuring only the position and
orientation, and since the current loads are strongly dependent
on the vehicle dynamics, we choose to employ a model-based
observer for the current estimation.
CPM 1: Vehicle Model: Key properties of a slender-body
AUV are taken into account when deriving the CPM: port-star-
board symmetry, self-stabilizing roll, and the fact that the length
is much larger than the width. Thus, by neglecting roll and ap-
plying a constant propeller set-point, the following CPM is pro-
posed:
is the vehicle mass, and denotes the Earth gravity. Further-
more, and are the distances between the buoyancy and
gravity center in surge and heave direction, respectively. It is as-
sumed that the vehicle is neutrally buoyant. The velocity vector
denotes the surge, sway, heave, pitch, and
yaw velocity, respectively. In the NED-frame, the current is de-
scribed by the vector . This vector is
rotated into the body-frame as , where
. This gives the following expression for the
relative velocity . The bias
captures the external disturbances such as drag from
an optical fibre connecting the vehicle to the surface vessel.
Moreover, it is included to compensate for unmodeled vehicle
and thruster dynamics, [12]. It is modeled as a slowly varying
process, where is a diagonal matrix containing the positive
time constants, and and are tunable scalar gains. These
are included for stability purposes and will be determined in
the upcoming section. In this paper, we consider vehicles with
control actuators in surge, pitch, and yaw resulting in the fol-
lowing control vector , which is common
for slender-body underwater vehicles in transit. The mass and
damping matrices yield
(7)
(8)

(4a) where denotes the mass elements included added mass. Fol-
lowing slender-body theory presented in [23, Ch. 7], we let the
(4b) damping coefficients in (8), which are all positive, be defined as
follows:
(4c)

where denotes the NED-frame position and

orientation vector, and the vector contains the pitch
and yaw angles. The matrix transforms body-fixed vectors
into NED-frame coordinates and is given by

(9)

where and so forth are the linear and nonlinear

damping coefficients, respectively. Only the linear off-diagonal
terms are included since these are dominating for slender-body
vehicles [23, Ch. 7.4]. The total damping is thus given by a linear
(5)
and a nonlinear part according to ,
934 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 16, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2008

where and denote the linear and non- the current, but a model that serves as basis for an observer
linear damping matrices, respectively. The Coriolis matrices intended to estimate the dominant response of the vehicle due
are defined as follows: to the current, i.e., a current-induced vessel model. The model
may also be interpreted as a third-order filter with gains ob-
tained from the vehicle parameters. By comparing the nominal
velocity with the actual velocity , the induced current
velocities in surge, sway, and heave may be obtained according
to the following:

(13)
(10)
Although the current velocity also affects the motions in pitch
and yaw, we assume that the main current loads are captured
(11) in the linear motions: surge, sway, and heave. In fact, it can be
shown by using the assumption on constant current velocity in
the NED-frame, i.e., ,
that , where (skew-
where , and are the added mass coefficients in surge, symmetric), [12]. Hence, in a Lyapunov sense, rotation of the
sway, and heave, respectively. See, e.g., [12, Ch. 3] for further vehicle is contributing to neither stabilizing or destabilizing the
details regarding the coefficients in Coriolis matrices. The main system. Thus, the proposed CPM 2 of the main current loads on
elements of the destabilizing overall Coriolis forces and mo- the vehicle is valid.
ments shown in (1) are comprised in (10) and (11), including
the Munk-moment. The Munk-moment is a hydrodynamic III. OBSERVER DESIGN
phenomenon which affects all geometric shapes in water except
spheres. This CPM includes the most dominant Munk-mo- In the following section, we propose two separate nonlinear
ments, i.e., and in pitch and Luenberger observers for the CPMs presented in Section II.
yaw, respectively. Especially for slender-body vehicles with
length much larger than the width causing , A. Preliminaries
the Munk-moment is decisive. For box framed vehicles with The following assumption and properties yield throughout the
, the resulting moments are often negligible. paper.
The Munk-moment is destabilizing in the sense that it tries to A.1: The pitch angle is limited by . For most
turn the vehicle perpendicular to the flow. In this model, the underwater vehicles, this is realistic given the inherent restoring
Munk-moments in pitch and yaw are captured in and moments preventing the vehicle from large pitch angles.
in , respectively. For more details on this, see, e.g., [32] and P.1: Only the position and the Euler angles, i.e., the vector
[11, Ch. 6)]. , is measured. Although the signals in , especially the hori-
CPM 2: Current-Induced Vessel Model: This is a current zontal position , are updated at low frequencies, we con-
induced vessel model that captures the slowly varying loads sider the error generated by the zero-order-hold in discrete time
caused by the current. The key task of this model is to function as bounded. Hence, is considered continuous.
as a basis for observer design to obtain an estimate of the current P.2: The magnitude and direction of the current is unknown
velocity . The following three DOF model is proposed: but upper bounded, i.e., there exists a constant such
that .
(12a) We use the following notation in this paper. For any positive
definite and symmetric matrix , and denote
(12b) the minimum and maximum eigenvalue of , respectively. Fur-
(12c) thermore, denotes the Euclidian norm of a vector.
In order to fully utilize the properties of the hydrodynamic
where represents the vehicle velocities in damping, the five DOF damping matrix in CPM 1 is separated
surge, sway, and heave, respectively, and into a diagonal and an off-diagonal part according to
denotes the vehicle position in the NED-frame. The matrices , where . Here,
are the top left submatrices of and denote the diagonal and off-diagonal part of the linear
and in (4), respectively, and the control vector damping matrix, respectively. The reason for this partition is the
yields . Underwater vehicles with no control matrix is not necessarily positive definite for slender-
actuators in sway and heave are incapable of counteracting body AUVs. However, this yields the following property.
the forces induced by the current in these directions. Hence, P.3: It follows from (8) that the nonlinear diagonal damping
in CPM 2, it is clear that given , and since and are matrix satisfies . Moreover, there
diagonal matrices, any nonzero velocities in sway and heave exists a constant such that .
must originate from the bias , which captures the In CPM 2, the three DOF damping matrix is diagonal.
slowly varying current forces. Hence, (12) is not a model of Hence, it follows that . To simplify
REFSNES et al.: MODEL-BASED OUTPUT FEEDBACK CONTROL OF SLENDER-BODY UNDERACTUATED AUVs 935

the notation we define the function , which by (NED and body-frame), CPM 1 (4) is rewritten in NED-frame
employing the mean value theorem gives coordinates as follows:

(18a)

(18b)
(18c)
where , and is on the line segment joining
where denotes the NED-frame velocities,
and . Furthermore, the damping matrix (8) gives that there
the NED-frame relative velocity yields . The su-
exists a constant such that .
perscript marks the NED-frame matrices. See, e.g., [12, Ch. 3.3]
P.4: The mass matrix and its submatrices are positive
for details regarding the matrix transformations. The following
definite and symmetric. Hence, and
property yields:
, where is
P.6: There exist sufficiently large constants such
the mass matrix transformed into the NED-frame.
that the Coriolis matrices are upper bounded according to
P.5: The rotation matrix is orthogonal and satisfies
. Furthermore, under A.1, there exist constants
such that yields
We propose the following Luenberger observer by copying the
dynamics in (18) and adding correction terms

(19a)
B. Current Observer
The following Luenberger observer is proposed. Note that the
(19b)
gray box indicates that this is implemented in the control system
(19c)
(14a)
where , and are positive definite
and diagonal observer gain matrices. Subtracting (19) from (18)
(14b) and using P.3 gives the following observer error dynamics
(14c)
(20a)
where , and are positive
definite and diagonal observer gain matrices. According to (13), (20b)
the estimated current velocity is derived as
(20c)
(15)
where and . Employing cascaded systems
Furthermore, we define the error vectors and theory [24], we define the following perturbation vector
. Subtracting (14) from (12) and letting
and , the observer error (21)
dynamics become
since is proportional to the current estimation error. This re-
(16a) sults in the following nominal observer error dynamics:
(16b)
(22a)
(16c)

where refers to in P.3. Let (22b)

(22c)
(17)
Notice that also evolves linearly with the estimated velocity
denote the overall current estimation error state. The error dy- , which growth is unknown. Hence, we apply the following
namics (16) will be proven uniformly globally exponentially assumption:
stable (UGES) in the upcoming section. A.2: There exists a constant such that the relative
velocity is bounded according to . This as-
C. Vehicle Observer
sumption will be lifted when the overall closed loop system,
In this section, we derive a nonlinear Luenberger observer for including the controller error dynamics, are analyzed. This is a
the vehicle dynamics. To avoid technicalities using two frames common method in output feedback controller design; see, e.g.,
936 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 16, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2008

[6]. Under A.2, we have that , which where is the minimum eigenvalue of , and
only consists of error variables and thus corresponding with cas- .
caded systems theory methods. Proof: Consider the following positive definite and radially
In order to fully exploit the dissipative property of the hy- unbounded Lyapunov function candidate .
drodynamic damping, we will analyze the current estimation Differentiating with respect to time gives
error and the vehicle observer error dynamics using one Lya-
punov function. Let the error vectors be defined as
, and . Note here that the
Using P.6, can be upper bounded as follows:
error vector includes the current estimation error. The nominal
observer error dynamics (16) and (22) can then be written in
compact form as the following:
(25)

(23) Recall that which gives that

for all
. We thus arrive at the following upper bound
on the Lyapunov function derivative:
where
(26)

Using Lyapunov theory [18], it follows that if (24) is satis-

fied, there exists a constant such that
. Thus, the origin of the nominal observer
error dynamics (23) is GES. .
Recall that the current estimation error dynamics (16) is a
stand-alone system independent on the vehicle observer error
dynamics (22). Notice, however, that the right-hand side of the
and where
system (16) includes the time-varying vector , whereas the
current error dynamics only involve . To circum-
vent this problem, we can consider as a general time-
varying signal using forward completeness as in [21]. We as-
sume that the time-varying vector exists for all . This
The nonlinear and the diagonal linear damping matrices are col- is trivial since in the following proofs is part of the tracking
lected in using P.3 as follows: error which automatically lifts this assumption. Hence, it fol-
lows that the origin of system (16) is UGES. We thus
have that the error variable defined in (17) can be bounded
by

Moreover, the vector consists of the following functions: (27)

where and are positive constants. Moreover, since

of system (23), and of (16) are GES and UGES,
respectively, it follows that of system (22)
is GES.
Remark 1: The Lyapunov analysis provides only sufficient
Notice that system (23) is autonomous since all the error vari- conditions for stability which often leads to conservative results.
ables are concatenated in the error vector . Consequently, In this case, the demand on (24) may be unnecessarily strict
we apply autonomous Lyapunov stability theory. The matrix since the nonlinear damping, which is dominant for most states,
is Hurwitz, and hence, there exist positive definite and sym- is not contributing to alleviate the condition on . However, the
metric matrices and such that . More- result clearly indicates that the observer feedback gains must be
over, since the current velocity is upper bounded, as claimed sufficiently high to dominate the destabilizing Coriolis forces
in P.2, gives that there exists a constant such that and the bias loads.
. Remark 2: Note that the globalness is given with respect to
Proposition 1: The origin of the nominal observer the chosen coordinate frame. It is not topologically possible to
error dynamics (23) is globally exponentially stable (GES) if the obtain results that are global in using any coordinate
following condition is satisfied: frame of like the Euler angles, Euler parameters, Euler-
Rodrigues parameters, or similar. Due to the topological prop-
erties of , these representations will either have one sin-
(24) gularity or two equilibrium points, something which precludes
REFSNES et al.: MODEL-BASED OUTPUT FEEDBACK CONTROL OF SLENDER-BODY UNDERACTUATED AUVs 937

global results on . Therefore, the state space defined in In this section, the Euler angle symbol is omitted when it is
this paper does not include , and the results in this used in a transformation matrix for notational simplicity. More-
paper are thus only global in the chosen coordinate frame. over, the time variable is included for the reference trajec-
tories since these are external time-varying signals. Thus, the
controller error dynamics are nonautonomous.
IV. OUTPUT FEEDBACK CONTROL
Step 1: The nonlinear damping introduces undesirable cou-
In this section, we design a nonlinear controller utilizing the pling terms that complicate the stability analysis. Therefore,
observer backstepping technique [20, Ch. 7)]. Since the vehicle since the pitch and heading angles are measured, we define two
is underactuated, the controller design and analysis become tracking error vectors as follows:
more involved. However, the fact that all states, including the
unactuated states sway and heave, are subjects to linear hy- (30)
drodynamic damping, enables a separate study of the tracking
The reason for this will become clear in the upcoming stability
error dynamics and the unactuated states. This approach was
analysis. Then, computing the corresponding error dynamics by
first introduced in [13], and it is a convenient feature of the
differentiating and with respect to time and using (29a)
backstepping procedure. The method is shortly described by
and that give
first designing the control vector considering it as an arbitrary
vector in . Second, we analyze the inherent dynamics of the (31a)
controller that arise since there are no controls in sway and
(31b)
heave. It will become clear that due to hydrodynamic damping
in all degrees of freedom, the velocities of the unactuated states where
converge to a bounded set.
The control objective is defined as tracking the desired orien-
tation as follows:

(28) Here, and are the continuous reference trajectories

for the angular velocities. The second error vector is defined as
as , where contains the smooth
and continuously differentiable reference trajectories. The key (32)
idea behind the approach shown in this paper is to split the total
tracking task in two. where is a vector of stabilizing func-
1) Design a control system such that the control objective tions that we will choose, and
stated in (28) is guaranteed. is the velocity tracking error vector. Inserting for in (32) into
2) By carefully designing the guidance system, global (31) yields
tracking of, for instance, way-points or a path can be ob-
(33a)
tained if the control objective (28) is met. For more details,
see, for instance, [7], in which they prove global conver- (33b)
gence to the desired track/path using a line-of-sight-based
where contains the stabilizing functions for
method in the guidance system. This concept is based
the actuated states: pitch and yaw. In order to render (33) stable
on the fact that given a nonzero forward speed and some
differential equations, we choose the stabilizing function to
orientation of the vehicle, any point in the global frame
evolve according to
can be reached.
(34)
A. Controller Design
where is a positive diagonal controller gain matrix.
Based on the observers designed in the prior section, the es- Note that we have used in the -function in order to avoid
timated position and velocity are available for feedback. nonlinear coupling terms involving the estimation error . This
Hence, we utilize the observer backstepping method. Further- results in the following expression for the - and -dynamics
more, since the control vector naturally evolves in the body-
frame, it is desirable to back-step into the following observer (35a)
dynamics: (35b)

(29a) where the stabilizing function is rewritten as

to fit into (35b), and where we have mul-
tiplied with the positive and diagonal controller gain matrix
(29b) in order to increase the design flexibility in the
(29c) controller.
938 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 16, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2008

Step 2: Proceeding with the -dynamics With the new error states, we will show that the controller error
dynamics can be written in a cascade with the nominal ob-
server dynamics as follows:

(36)
(39a)
We choose the control vector according to (39b)

where the perturbation is to be defined. The error

system (39b) represents the nominal observer error dynamics
(37)
depicted in (23), where the origin is proven GES in
where , and is a diagonal controller gain the Proof of Proposition 1. The complete observer system, in-
matrix. Notice that we have used feedback gain and not cluding the perturbation vector (21) will be analyzed in the
in (37) in order to keep the level of measurement noise proof of the final theorem of this paper. Recall that the pertur-
in the controller to a minimum. Furthermore, note that the con- bation vector is derived under A.2, which claims bounded
troller is considered as a general vector in and that velocities of the vehicle. In order to avoid circularity in the fol-
are left undecided. This is, however, trivial since the Lyapunov lowing stability analysis, we lift A.2 and replace it with the fol-
analysis is valid, provided that (37) is satisfied, independently lowing assumption on bounded desired velocities.
of the contents of vector . The fact that the second and third A.3: There exists a constant such that the desired
element are zero, i.e., will be considered in velocity is bounded according to .
Section IV-C, where also will be determined. Under A.3, we have that the perturbation vector to the
Remark 3: The proposed controller (37) is not directly de- nominal observer error dynamics (23) can be upper bounded
pendent on the estimation error . This is an advantage since according to
the horizontal position provided by the acoustical measurement
system can be contaminated by severe noise. If controller terms
proportional to are included, scattering and thereby degrada-
tion of the controller is likely to occur.
(40)
B. Controller Analysis
by using (32) and (34). Hence, consists only on error vari-
In [21], a solution for output feedback control of dynamic ables and can be treated as a stand-alone perturbation. Note that
positioning (DP) of ships is reported. The paper presents, by the proof of Proposition 1 still holds when replacing A.2 with
employing cascaded systems theory [25], a convenient method A.3.
for deriving observers and controllers for nonlinear systems. It In order to rewrite the control vector (37) so that it consists
is shown that the separation principle holds for the nonlinear of the actual states and not the estimated states, we use that
case in the sense that the controller and observer can be tuned and resulting in
separately. The DP model in [21] is nonlinear only because of
the rotation matrix between the NED and the body-frame. This (41)
paper is thus an extension to that result since the CPM models in
this paper are coupled and involve nonlinear damping. Another Using (41), the controller (37) can be rewritten as follows:
favorable result of the following analysis is that the controller
gains and do not need to meet high gain criteria in
order to ensure stability.
We want to formulate the controller error dynamics and ob- (42)
server estimation error as a cascaded system. In order to achieve
this, we need to define new controller error vectors; the error Here, we have collected the terms involving the estimation error
between the desired state and the actual state into the perturbation vector as follows:
, and not the estimated state , which is the natural
result of the observer backstepping technique used for the con-
troller design in Section IV-A. Hence, we define the following
new error vectors:

where we have used (41), and that

(38) . Inserting the modified control vector (42)
REFSNES et al.: MODEL-BASED OUTPUT FEEDBACK CONTROL OF SLENDER-BODY UNDERACTUATED AUVs 939

into the actual vehicle dynamics (4) results in the following where we have inserted for the current estimation error dy-
-dynamics: namics (16), which are rewritten in the body-frame. Ac-
cording to [1, Lemma 2], the origin is UGAS if the
Lyapunov function (44) satisfies

(46)

where , and is a class function

satisfying , where , and is
(43)
some constant. In this case, since is proven UGES
and satisfying (27), it follows that condition (46) holds, and
where , and from (35a) and
thus is UGAS, and therefore also the origin
(41) the perturbation vector for the tracking error capturing the
of the unperturbed system (39a) is UGAS.
terms involving the estimation error becomes .
3) This step involves determining the growth of the perturba-
Having established this, it follows that the rewritten tracking
tion vector . Using P.2, P.6, and P.5 gives
error state (43) can be viewed as a cascade with the nominal
observer error dynamics (23), and where the perturbation vector
is given by , as depicted in (39).
Notice here that the nominal observer error dynamics (23)
includes the time-varying signals , while we
only consider the tracking error . We thus consider where we have used that
as general time-varying signals using forward , under A.3. The perturbation can be shown
completeness [21]. The following assumption, which will be to be upper bounded by the tracking error state and the es-
proven to hold in the Appendix, is applied. timation error as follows:
A.4: The time-varying signals exist for all
. (47)
Proposition 2: The origin and of the cas-
caded system (39), described in (43) and (23), is uniformly glob- where
ally asymptotically stable (UGAS) under A.3, A.4, and if con-
dition (24) is satisfied.
Proof: Following cascaded systems theory arguments each
of the functions in (39) are analyzed separately in three steps.
1) The origin of the nominal observer error dynamics
(23), denoted as in (39), is proven GES Thus, the linear growth restriction on in the pertur-
in the Proof of Proposition 1. bation is satisfied. Consequently, based on the three prior
2) At this step, we want to establish the stability properties steps, it follows that the origin and of the
of the unperturbed system shown in cascaded system (39) is UGAS [24, Theorem 2.8]. This
(43). Similarly as in Section III, we want to exploit the completes the proof.
dissipative property of the hydrodynamic damping. We Up to this point, we have only considered the nominal ob-
thus include the current estimation error in the controller server error dynamics (22). The following theorem establishes
stability analysis and propose the following radially un- uniform global asymptotic stability of the overall output feed-
bounded Lyapunov function candidate back controller. Let the error vector denote the com-
plete error state excluding the current estimation error, i.e.,
.
(44) Theorem 1: The origin and of the cascaded
system (16), (20), and (43) is UGAS under A.1, A.2, and A.4,
and if (24) is satisfied.
where and . Differentiating
Proof: We write the overall system including the current
(44) with respect to time and inserting for the tracking dy-
error dynamics in the following compact form:
namics (43) without the perturbation gives
(48a)
(48b)

. The origin of the unperturbed

system in (48a) is UGAS given Proposition 1
and 2. Furthermore, the current estimation error dynamics (48b)
(45) are proven UGES in Proposition 1. Following cascaded systems
940 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 16, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2008

theory, it remains to show bounded growth on the perturbation i.e., [12], which clearly manifests the statement above.
vector . It follows from (40) that it can be bounded This approach, however, is not employed in this paper since
linearly by and hence satisfying only leads to negative semidefinite Lyapunov function
derivatives, which subsequently enhance the complexity of the
(49) stability analysis.
We proceed by analyzing the -dynamics by rewriting
where (51) into compact form and collecting all the bounded and con-
verging signals into the vector function

(52)
The linear growth restriction on in the perturbation term is where and
satisfied. It thus follows from [24] that the origin
of the system (48) is UGAS. Consequently, it follows that the
origin of the error dynamics (16), (20), and (43) are UGAS.

C. Underactuated
In this section, we consider the fact that the vehicle is under-
actuated. Recalling that the control vector yields

The vector captures the off-diagonal terms in the mass,

(50) damping and Coriolis matrices ( and ). Furthermore, no-
tice that consists solely of bounded and converging signals
This results in a dynamic constraint in the controller for the . Hence, we add to the function .
unactuated states, i.e., sway and heave since we cannot assign Proposition 3: The —subsystem is input-to-state stable
control force in these directions. It is clear from the analysis (ISS) from to .
in Section IV that the -dynamics are UGAS provided that Proof: This can be proven by applying for instance the Lya-
the control vector satisfies (37). For pitch and heave, the ob- punov function candidate , which differ-
vious choice is to design the stabilizing function rendering entiating with respect to time along the solutions of gives
the tracking error dynamics stable since we can assign . This leads to
and arbitrarily. This is, however, not feasible for and
. Instead, and must satisfy the differential equation (53)
(37) that arises since there are no controls in sway or heave
. Hence, in this sense, instead of tracking where is inserted into since is proven
, the -dynamics track the actual velocities . bounded in Section III-B. Then, there exists a constant that
It will become clear that the -dynamics converge ex- satisfies , and the following upper bound on (53) is
ponentially to a bounded set due to the linear hydrodynamic obtained:
damping in sway and heave.
From (37), we have that

Clearly, due to the dissipative hydrodynamic damping, we

achieve UGES of of the unforced system. This implies that
(51) the system is ISS from to [18, Lemma 4.6]. Hence,
converges to the bounded set .
Moreover, since and as , it follows that
where the bounded and converging variables are concatenated as . Finally, as implies
in the function . All the signals in that as . Consequently, the velocities in sway
are shown to be bounded or converging to zero except and heave, i.e., are bounded and converge to the same
the bias term . Recall from Section II that this captures the set. This completes the proof.
unmodeled dynamics. Obviously, the proposed CPM (4) needs
to resemble the real world to a certain extent in order to ob-
tain a stable MBC for real systems. This is the fundamental V. CASE STUDY: THE MINESNIPER MKII
idea behind MBC in this paper. Therefore, it follows naturally The parameters of the Minesniper MkII (see Fig. 2) are
to declare the effect of the unmodeled dynamics as bounded and shown in Table I. The added mass coefficients were obtained
hence, is bounded. Another common ap- by using the computer program WAMIT, whereas the damping
proach in marine applications is to define the bias as constant, and thruster coefficients were calculated based on basin tests
REFSNES et al.: MODEL-BASED OUTPUT FEEDBACK CONTROL OF SLENDER-BODY UNDERACTUATED AUVs 941

Fig. 2. Minesniper MkII. Courtesy of KDA, Norway.

TABLE I
MINESNIPER MKII CPM CONSTANTS

Fig. 3. Pitch control by mass movement.

where is the water density, and and denote the propeller

diameter and the thrust deduction coefficient, respectively. Fur-
thermore, is the ambient water velocity in
steady-state where (typically 0.1–0.4) is denoted as
the wake fraction number [12]. Based on the linear approxima-
tion and are positive constants. The equations for forward
thruster force and yaw moment can then be described as

(55)
TABLE II
SENSOR PROPERTIES where and are port and starboard propeller revolutions,
and is the distance from the propeller to the center of the
body. The corresponding revolutions are then obtained by

(56a)

(56b)

where is the constant revolution providing surge velocity.

at Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace at Stjørdal, Norway.
Table II presents the sensor suite of the vehicle.
A. Control Forces and Moments
This section describes the mapping from the control moments
derived in Section IV-A to the control action of the actuators on
the vehicle.
1) Thrusters: On the Minesniper MkII, the heading control
is obtained by two horizontal thrusters located on each side of
the hull at the center of the vehicle. Recall from (3) that the
thruster force is , where the constants
are defined as [33]
2) Pitch Actuator: The Minesniper is equipped with a move-
able mass for pitch control. It is a common phenomenon that
underwater vehicles can have difficulties obtaining initial pitch
angle when surfacing. This is avoided by this type of control
action since the static pitch angle varies with the location of the
pitch mass. Fig. 3 describes the system of pitch control by mass
movement. Movement of the pitch mass leads to the following
expression for the center of gravity: ,
where is the distance from the center to the mass, and
denotes the weight of the actuator. Recall that the vehicle is neu-
trally buoyant, hence . Notice also that the con-
trol moment obtained in (37) involves , which contains the
expression for the static pitch angle given a certain ; see (6).
Therefore, to obtain the expression for the distance of the pitch
mass actuator , we solve the equation
with respect to . Then, to generate the pitch moment given this
pitch angle, it follows from Fig. 3 that the pitch mass distance is

(57)
(54)
942 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 16, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2008

Fig. 4. Kinematics of the horizontal LOS guidance system.

Fig. 5. Kinematics of the vertical LOS guidance system.

where is saturated such that which
inherently includes the limit .
cross-track-error and the length of the aiming vector, the desired
B. Line-of-Sight Guidance System heading yields , where
Guidance is provided by two decoupled line-of-sight systems
for heading and pitch, respectively, [22].
if
1) Heading: In order to avoid potentially large cross-track
errors, the aiming point is moved from the next way-point to a sign otherwise.
point on the track line by setting the length of the aiming vector
The LOS-point on the track (see Fig. 4) is given by
to ; see Fig. 4. We start by defining the total track length be-
tween way-point and , i.e., ,
where and
In order to ensure correct desired heading at all times, the guid-
ance system automatically switches to way-point tracking ac-
cording to the following:

where the ordered pairs and if or

are the present and the previous then
way-points, respectively. The distances and are given
by
Care must be taken when determining the size of prior to a
run. It is shown in [15] that for way-point maneuvering of ships,
must be larger than some constant which is dependent on the
vehicle dynamics, actuators, and the forward speed. This corre-
sponds well with tests carried out on the Minesniper revealing
that when was too small, excessive control action and an in-
crease in the cross-track error occurred.
where The next way-point is activated if one of two conditions is
met. The most usual case is if the vehicle has penetrated the
way-point watch radius or if the vehicle has passed a
way-point by a distance larger than
Note that ranges from 0% to 100% of . The angle
between these two vectors is then defined by if or
then
(58) Activate next way-point.

where . The cross-track error 2) Pitch: The LOS method is modified for pitch control ac-
may now be defined as . Based on the cording to Fig. 5. The pitch angle between two way-points is
REFSNES et al.: MODEL-BASED OUTPUT FEEDBACK CONTROL OF SLENDER-BODY UNDERACTUATED AUVs 943

Fig. 6. Left: Measured (red dots) and estimated (blue line) horizontal position of the Minesniper MkII performing way-point (green squares) tracking. A 5-m
radius of acceptance around each way-point is included. Right: Measured (red) and estimated (blue) depth and orientation of the Minesniper MkII.

. The distance between on the final reference pitch angle to ensure that the desired
the next way-point and the LOS point is given by pitch angle is feasible at all times, i.e.,

(62)

(59) where are determined by setting the pitch weight in

its maximum and minimum position, respectively.
Hence, the desired pitch angle is given by
, where D. Sea Trials—Results and Discussion
The sea trials of Minesniper MkII were performed in
Trondheimsfjorden nearby Stjørdal, Norway. The observers,
guidance, and controller were implemented as functions written
in C code with 20-Hz update rate. Fig. 6 shows the measured
and the estimated position and orientation of the Minesniper
according to Fig. 5. MkII. The bay area is quite shallow and narrow which limited
the location of the way-points. However, the heading shown
C. Reference Trajectories in the bottom right plot of Fig. 6 shows large variations of the
heading, which demonstrates the performance of the controller.
In order to obtain smooth and continuously differentiable ac-
The observer provides satisfactory estimates for the entire
celeration, velocity, and position reference trajectories, we uti-
run with small deviations and little noise. Toward the end
lize a second-order filter cascaded with a low-pass filter [12].
of the run, we experienced increased noise in the acoustical
The reference trajectories are then given by
measurements mainly due to the topography of the seabed
blocking the view of the acoustical receivers. Nevertheless, the
observer seemed to cope with measurement drop outs and the
(60)
noise in a satisfactory manner. From Fig. 6, dead-reckoning
can be seen between the second and third way-point. Clearly,
(61) the observer provides satisfactory position estimated despite
measurement drop outs. The way-point watch radius was set
where is the relative damping ratio, is the to m. This caused the vehicle to slightly miss the
natural frequency, and the guidance functions are collected in third and the fourth way-point. Moreover, the reference system
. A saturation is included gain was chosen relatively low, , in order to keep
944
Fig. 7. Tracking results. Left: The desired trajectories provided by the reference generator. Center: The tracking error in pitch and heading, i.e., z and [z
Right: The controller action, thruster revolution, and position of the pitch weight.
the yaw rate small. The main reason for this was that given
the center location of the thrusters, several sea trials revealed
that erratic usage of the thrusters could cause intractable yaw
motion. Therefore, emphasis was placed on keeping the yaw
motion within relatively restrictive boundaries. Fig. 7 presents
the tracking results in pitch and heading and the actuator action.
The tracking performance is satisfactory with relatively small
deflections of the actuators. In pitch, some error occurred in the
beginning of the run. This was because the forward acceleration
generated a pitch moment. However, the pitch controller calms
the motion relatively fast despite limited rate in the pitch mass
actuator. The estimation results are presented in Fig. 8 showing
satisfactory observer performance. We were unable to measure
the actual current. However, the estimates indicate a slight cur-
rent from South-East. Table III shows the controller/observer
gains used in this run. The current observer gains were set equal
to the upper left matrices of the vehicle observer gains. The
controller gains were found by trial and error since there exists,
to the author’s best knowledge, no formal methods for tuning
gains in a backstepping controller at the present time. Several
runs indicated that the controller gain should be set small
and large for optimal tracking results. This is mainly due to
uncertainty of the damping coefficients which, togethers with a
large , aggravated the performance.
VI. CONCLUSION AND FURTHER WORK
An output feedback controller was proposed for slender-body
underactuated underwater vehicles. The CPM system consisted
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 16, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2008
;z ] .
of two separate models: a five DOF vehicle model and a three
DOF current induced vessel model accounting for the main cur-
rent loads. Part of the vehicle CPM was linearized about the rel-
ative surge velocity. The nonlinear Luenberger observers and
the controller, which was designed using the observer backstep-
ping technique, were proven UGAS using Lyapunov and cas-
caded system theory. An advantage of the employed method is
that it does not require any high gain nor bounded feedback con-
troller gains. Furthermore, the observer and controller gains can
be tuned separately. Experimental sea trials on the Minesniper
MkII were presented showing satisfactory observer and tracking
performance. Further work involves obtaining more accurate ve-
hicle parameters and optimal tuning of the controller feedback
gains in attempt to optimize the performance of the vehicle.
APPENDIX
In this section, we prove that A.4 holds by showing forward
completeness of the closed loop system. This is carried out
by including the reference system algorithms presented in
Section V-C in the overall stability analysis and thereby show
that the global position exists all .
Proposition 4: The time-varying vector
exists for all .
Proof: Consider the following Lyapunov function:
(63)
REFSNES et al.: MODEL-BASED OUTPUT FEEDBACK CONTROL OF SLENDER-BODY UNDERACTUATED AUVs 945

Fig. 8. Estimation results. The left column shows the estimation error ~(t). The center column presents the estimated velocities ^(t). The right column describes
the estimated current velocity ^ (t) and the 
 (t)-dynamics versus [^
v(t); w^(t)].

TABLE III 2) The overall observer-controller error dynamics given in

CONTROLLER, OBSERVER, AND LOS GAINS (16), (20), and (43) can now be analyzed using the Lya-
punov function (63) without applying A.4 since is in-
cluded in . Based on these observations, it can be
shown by inserting the error dynamics and using Schwartz
inequality that satisfies , where
is a constant. Hence, the vector exists and can
be continued for all . Thus, A.4 holds.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank their colleagues at CeSOS
for valuable discussions and contributions to the testing of the
Differentiating with respect to time gives Minesniper MkII.

REFERENCES
[1] O. M. Aamo, M. Arcak, T. I. Fossen, and P. V. Kokotović, “Global
output tracking control of a class of Euler-Lagrange systems with
monotonic nonlinearities in the velocities,” Int. J. Control, vol. 47, no.
7, pp. 649–658, 2001.
[2] A. P. Aguiar, L. Cremean, and J. P. Hespanha, “Position tracking for
a nonlinear underactuated hovercraft: Controller design and experi-
mental results,” in Proc. 42nd IEEE Conf. Decision Control, Maui, HI,
2003, pp. 3858–3863.
(64) [3] A. P. Aguiar and A. M. Pascoal, “Dynamic positioning and way-point
tracking of underactuated AUVs in the presence of ocean currents,”
Before proceeding we note the following: in Proc. 41st IEEE Conf. Decision Control, Las Vegas, NV, 2002, pp.
2105–2110.
1) Based on the guidance algorithms presented in [4] F. Alonge, F. D. Ippolito, and F. Raimondi, “Trajectory tracking of
Section V-B, it can be shown that underactuated underwater vehicles,” in Proc. 40th IEEE Conf. Decision
, where is a sufficiently large Control, Orlando, FL, 2001, pp. 4421–4426.
[5] P. Batista, C. Silvestre, and P. Oliveira, “A quaternion sensor based
constant. Moreover, and can be linearly upper controller for homing of underactuated AUVs,” in Proc. 45th IEEE
bounded by signals captured in . Conf. Decision Control, San Diego, CA, 2006, pp. 51–56.
946 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 16, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2008
[6] H. Berghuis and H. Nijmeijer, “A passivity approach to controller-ob-
server design for robots,” IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom., vol. 9, no. 6,
pp. 740–753, Dec. 1993.
[7] E. Børhaug and K. Y. Pettersen, “Cross-track control for underactu-
ated autonomous vehicles,” in Proc. 44th IEEE Conf. Decision Con-
trol, Seville, Spain, 2005, pp. 602–608.
[8] M. Breivik and T. I. Fossen, “Principles of guidance-based path fol-
lowing in 2D and 3D,” in Proc. 44th IEEE Conf. Decision Control,
Seville, Spain, 2005, pp. 627–634.
[9] R. Christi, F. A. Papoulias, and A. J. Healey, “Adaptive sliding mode
control of autonomous underwater vehicles in the dive plane,” IEEE J.
Ocean. Eng., vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 152–160, Jul. 1990.
[10] K. D. Do, Z. P. Jiang, J. Pan, and H. Nijmeijer, “Global output feed-
back universal controller for stabilization and tracking of underactuated
ODIN: A spherical underwater vehicle,” Automatica, vol. 40, no. 1, pp.
117–124, 2004.
[11] O. M. Faltinsen, Sea Loads on Ships and Ocean Structures. Cam-
bridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990.
[12] T. I. Fossen, “Marine control systems: Guidance, navigation and
control of ships, rigs and underwater vehicles,” Marine Cybernetics,
Trondheim, Norway, 2002 [Online]. Available: http://www.marinecy-
bernetics.com
[13] T. I. Fossen, M. Breivik, and R. Skjetne, “Line-of-sight path following
of underactuated marine craft,” in Proc. IFAC Manoeuvring and Con-
trol Marine Craft (MCMC), Girona, Spain, 2003, pp. 244–249.
[14] T. I. Fossen and O. E. Fjellstad, “Robust adaptive control of underwater
vehicles,” in Proc. 3rd IFAC Workshop Control Applicat. Marine Syst.
(CAMS95), Trondheim, Norway, 1995, pp. 66–74.
[15] E. Fredriksen and K. Y. Pettersen, “-exponential way-point manoeu-
vering of ships,” in Proc. 43rd IEEE Conf. Decision Control, Atlantis,
Paradise Island, Bahamas, 2004, pp. 5360–5367.
[16] A. J. Healey and D. Lienard, “Multivariable sliding-mode control for
autonomous diving and steering of unmanned underwater vehicles,”
IEEE J. Ocean. Eng., vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 327–339, Jul. 1993.
[17] A. J. Healey, S. M. Rock, S. Cody, D. Miles, and J. Brown, “Toward
an improved understanding of thruster dynamics for underwater vechi-
cles,” IEEE J. Ocean. Eng., vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 354–361, Oct. 1995.
[18] H. K. Khalil, Nonlinear Systems, 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 2002.
[19] J. C. Kinsey and L. L. Whitcomb, “Preliminary field experience with
the DVLNAV integrated navigation system for oceanographic sum-
bersibles,” J. Control Eng. Practice, vol. 12, no. 12, pp. 1541–1549,
2004.
[20] M. Krstić, I. Kanellakopoulos, and P. V. Kokotović, Nonlinear and
Adaptive Control Design. New York: Wiley, 1995.
[21] A. Loría, T. I. Fossen, and E. Panteley, “A separation principle for
dynamic positioning of ships: Theoretical and experimental results,”
IEEE Trans. Control Syst. Technol., vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 332–343, Aug.
2000.
[22] D. B. Marco and A. J. Healey, “Command, control, and navigation:
Experimental results with the NPS ARIES AUV,” J. Ocean. Eng., vol.
26, no. 4, pp. 466–476, Oct. 2001.
[23] J. N. Newman, Marine Hydrodynamics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1977.
[24] E. Panteley, E. Lefeber, A. Loría, and H. Nijmeijer, “Exponential
tracking control of a mobile car using a cascaded approach,” in Proc.
IFAC Workshop Motion Control, Grenoble, France, 1998, pp. 221–226.
[25] E. Panteley and A. Loría, “On global uniform asymptotic stability of
nonlinear time-varying non autonomous systems in cascade,” Syst.
Control Lett., vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 131–138, 1998.
[26] J. E. Refsnes, K. Y. Pettersen, and A. J. Sørensen, “Observer design for
underwater vehicles with angle and position measurement,” in Proc.
IFAC Manoeuvring Control of Marine Craft (MCMC), Lisboa, Por-
tugal, 2006.
[27] J. E. Refsnes, A. J. Sørensen, and K. Y. Pettersen, “A 6 DOF nonlinear
observer for AUVs with experimental results,” in Proc. 15th IEEE
Mediterranean Conf. Control Automation (MED), Athens, Greece,
2007, pp. 1–7.
[28] J. E. Refsnes, A. J. Sørensen, and K. Y. Pettersen, “Output feedback
control of an AUV with experimental results,” in Proc. 15th IEEE
Mediterranean Conf. Control Automation (MED), Athens, Greece,
2007, pp. 1–8.
[29] J. E. Refsnes, A. J. Sørensen, and K. Y. Pettersen, “Output feedback
control of underwater vehicles with current estimation,” Int. J. Control,
vol. 80, no. 7, pp. 1136–1150, 2007.
[30] D. A. Smallwood and L. Whitcomb, “Model-based dynamic posi-
tioning of underwater robotic vehicles: Theory and experiments,”
IEEE J. Ocean. Eng., vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 169–186, Jan. 2004.
[31] A. J. Sørensen, “Structural issues in the design and operation of marine
control systems,” Annu. Rev. Contr., vol. 29, pp. 125–149, 2005.
[32] M. S. Traiantafyllou and F. S. Hover, “Maneuvering and control of
marine vehicles,” Maneuvering and control of marine vehicles, Cam-
bridge, MA, Tech. Rep., 2002.
[33] L. L. Whitcomb and D. Yoerger, “Development, comparison and
preliminary experimental validation of nonlinear dynamic thruster
models,” IEEE J. Ocean. Eng., vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 481–494, Oct. 1999.
[34] S. Zhao and J. Yuh, “Experimental study on advanced underwater robot
control,” IEEE Trans. Robotics, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 695–703, Aug. 2005.
Jon E. Refsnes received the M.Sc. degree in ma-
rine technology from the Norwegian University of
Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, in
2003, where he is currently working toward the
Ph.D. degree in marine technology . The project
is in cooperation with Kongsberg Defence and
Aerospace, Stjørdal, Norway.
His research interests are underwater vehicles,
modeling and hydrodynamics, observer design, and
control.
Asgeir J. Sørensen received the M.Sc. degree in ma-
rine technology and the Ph.D. degree in engineering
cybernetics, both from the Norwegian University of
Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondeim, in 1988
and 1993, respectively.
From 1993–2002, he was employed in the ABB
Group in various positions as a Research Scientist,
Project Manager, Department Manager, and Tech-
nical Manager in the Business Area Automation
Marine and Turbochargers. Since 1999, he has held
the position of Professor of Marine Cybernetics at
the Department of Marine Technology, NTNU.
Kristin Ytterstad Pettersen (SM’04) received the
M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering
from the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway, in 1992
and 1996, respectively.
She became a Associate Professor in 1996, and
in 2002 Professor, in the Department of Engi-
neering Cybernetics, NTNU. In 1999, she was a
Visiting Fellow in the Department of Mechanical
and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University,
Princeton, NJ. She has published more than 70
conference and journal papers. Her research interests include nonlinear control
of mechanical systems with applications to robotics, satellites, AUVs, and
ships.
Dr. Pettersen received the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS
TECHNOLOGY Outstanding Paper Award in 2006. She holds several board
positions.