Research on Lateral Path Following for Supercavitating Vehicles Based on ADRC–HOSM

Abstract

Supercavitating vehicles offer considerable potential for high-speed underwater navigation owing to their low drag and high velocity. However, their guidance and control system design is significantly challenged by complex hydrodynamic interactions and pronounced nonlinearities. In this paper, the straight-line path-following problem for a supercavitating vehicle is investigated on the basis of a lateral dynamic model. An inner-loop yaw controller is designed by integrating a higher-order sliding mode control (HOSMC) scheme within an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) framework. This combination compensates for system uncertainties and external disturbances while enhancing transient performance. Furthermore, a tail slanting force is introduced to attenuate planing force disturbances. For the outer loop, a line-of-sight (LOS) guidance law, which incorporates a reduced-order extended state observer (RESO) to estimate the sideslip angle, generates the yaw command to achieve path following. The finite-time convergence of the overall closed-loop system is rigorously proven using Lyapunov theory. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed dual-loop guidance and control strategy delivers rapid, smooth, and accurate path tracking in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances, confirming its effectiveness and robustness.

Keywords

Supercavitation / Higher-order sliding mode control (HOSMC) / ADRC / LOS / Path following

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Harbin Engineering University and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

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