Robust dynamic heading tracking control for wave gliders

Heading control plays an essential role in improving accuracy of all kinds of navigations for wave gliders. However, the performance will exhibit large heading errors and oscillations caused by weak maneuverability and large ocean current disturbance when the wave glider is gliding at a time-varying velocity. A robust dynamic heading tracking control integrated a modified active disturbance rejection controller (MADRC) and an improved anti-windup (IAW) compensator was put forward in this paper, which could extremely guarantee heading tracking accuracy with appropriate actuator power consumption in real time. Focused on dynamically tracking a time-varying desired heading, a reduced-order extended state observer (RESO) was designed to estimate and compensate uncertain disturbance and reduce the computational complexity. The IAW was applied to deal with actuator saturation problem, which could further reduce convergence time and power consumption in the heading control. Following this, a closed-loop control was put forward with a dynamic model of “Black Pearl” wave glider and a given heading control. The proposed control was verified by simulations and sea trials compared with conventional heading controls, which demonstrated its effectiveness and practicability.