Prescribed Performance Line-of-Sight Guidance Law for Underactuated AUVs: Theory and Preliminary Test Results

This paper presents a prescribed performance guidance line-of-sight (LOS) law derived from the traditional LOS algorithm for underactuated AUVs. At the initial stage, the proposed guidance law can be regarded as a proportional LOS guidance law. Then, by the merit of LOS algorithm, the cross-track error will exponentially converges to zero. Subsequently, once the error converges to a threshold so that the performance inequalities is satisfied, the guidance law smoothly switches to a prescribed performance guidance law, which ensures that the cros-strack error is confined to the predefined constraints. The asymptotic stability of closed-loop system is established via Lyapunov theory. Moreover, preliminary experimental tests in model basin and lake are carried out to validate the effective of proposed guidance law. Copyright (C) 2022 The Authors.