Contraction Based Tracking Control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

This paper discusses the incremental stability of an underwater vehicle using the contraction theory. Stability analysis considered in vehicle dynamics of a simple and a more advanced model has the ability to constructing the controller to track the desired trajectory of underwater vehicle position. The natural contracting behavior of an underwater vehicle is ensured for a more advanced model of vehicle to derive contracting exponentially stable controller. The tuning parameters of the controller have selected analytically from the incremental stability analysis using contraction theory. The controller design is restricted to parametric-strict-feedback form to develop an incremental backstepping design technique. In this paper, proposed method afford to construct a controller in a recursive way and it enforces incremental exponential stability of an underwater vehicle and not just global asymptotic stability.