Adaptive variable threshold event-triggered control for trajectory tracking of autonomous underwater vehicles with actuator saturation

Abstract This article develops a novel event-triggered sliding mode control (ETSMC) approach with variable threshold to deal with trajectory tracking matters of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) accompanied by actuator saturation and external disturbances, which can effectively reduce the communication burden between controller and actuator. The proposed scheme will be very practical when some extreme situations occur. First, the closed-loop system is split into two parts, fixed terms determined by the system itself and nonlinear terms caused by uncertain factors. The nonlinear terms are estimated through adaptive technique. Then apposite event-triggered mechanism, adaptive laws and modeled actuator saturation characteristics are designed. The correctness of the presented scheme is illustrated via the stability analysis in the sequel, and the Zeno phenomenon is certificated to be excluded simultaneously. Finally, two different reference motion trajectories are adopted in the simulation experiments, which can indicate that the proposed ETSMC possesses performance superiority and only requires to consume a small amount of communication resources in trajectory tracking control of AUVs.