Proceedings of the Thirty-second (2022) International Ocean and Polar Engineering ConferenceShanghai, China, June 5–10, 2022
Copyright © 2022 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE)
ISBN 978-1-880653-81-4; ISSN 1098-6189

www.isope.org

Research on Path Tracking Control of Underwater Cleaning Robot
Yanmin Huang1, Guoyuan Tang1, Daomin Huang2, Hongxuan Chen1
1.School of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering, Huazhong University of Science&Technology, Wuhan, China
2. Department of Early- warning Technology, Air Force Early Warning Academy, Wuhan, China

ABSTRACTand Ouden, C,2021). The traditional manual cleaning of cages is laborintensive, inefficient, and expensive. Therefore, with the support ofmodern science and technology, it will speed up the modernization of theAs part of intelligent fish farm, the use of the underwater cleaning robot
to clean aquaculture cages is of great significance to the future intelligent

aquaculture industry by using underwater cleaning robots.

development of the aquaculture industry. It is a useful method to let theIn recent years, the research of underwater cleaning robot has attracted

cleaning robot perform cleaning tasks along the preset path to improveextensive attention (Song, C, and Cui, W, 2020; Wu, X, Wang, S, Wang,

the cleaning efficiency of aquaculture cages, and to solve the problem ofX, and He, G,2021). It becomes necessary to consider how to use various

path tracking, an adaptive controller combined with backstepping sliding

advanced technologies to achieve accurate path tracking of underwatermode and RBF neural network is designed. In addition, considering

robot (Xu, R, Tang, G, Han, L, and Xie, D, 2019). In the complex marine

engineering applicability, a thrust allocation method based on theenvironment, the underwater robot has characteristics of time-varying

combination of normalization and pseudo-inverse method is adopted inhydrodynamic, strong motion coupling, highly nonlinear model,

this paper. The simulation results show that the designed controller is ofirregular ocean current disturbance force, and the hydrodynamic

excellent robustness to uncertain disturbances.

parameters that are hard to measure accurately lead to difficulty toestablish a dynamic model accurately. These factors will lead to theKEY WORDS: Cleaning robot; adaptive control; path tracking; thrust

deterioration of the path tracking performance of the underwater robot

allocation(Chao, Yang, Feng, Yao, MingJun, and Zhang, 2018). In order toovercome the internal and external uncertain disturbances of theINTRODUCTION

underwater robot during the task execution and meet the actual accuracy
requirements of the path tracking, the designed controller is required toWith the increasing demand for seafood in human society, thebe insensitive to parameter perturbations and have good robustness.

aquaculture industry has developed rapidly, and it has further promoted

Nowadays, a series of methods applicable to the motion control of

the continuous expansion of the scale of fish farms around the world (Ola,underwater robots have been proposed, such as PID control, adaptive

B, Sm, C, Sam, D, and Nk, A, 2021). Fish farming in aquaculture cages

control, fuzzy control, sliding mode control, neural network control, andusing marine resources not only improves the quality of fish but also

some integrated control methods, some of which have been applied tocreates a large and sustainable economic value for society. However, thethe actual environment. In addition, some advanced control strategies

aquaculture cage is attached by marine organisms easily, easily dirty, andhave also been considered for use in the field of marine equipment (Sun,blocked, which leads to poor water exchange and fish disease, so it needs

Y, Zhang, C, Zhang, G, Xu, H, and Ran, X, 2019; Yang, Y, Tu, H, Song,to be cleaned regularly (Ouyang, B, Wills, PS, Tang, Y, Hallstrom, JO,L, Chen, L, and Sun, J, 2021).

1035