A Trajectory Tracking and Local Path Planning Control Strategy for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

The control strategy of an underdriven unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) equipped with front sonar and actuator faults in a continuous task environment is investigated. Considering trajectory tracking and local path planning in complex-obstacle environments, we propose a task transition strategy under the event-triggered mechanism and design the corresponding state space and action space for the trajectory tracking task under the deep reinforcement learning framework. Meanwhile, a feed-forward compensation mechanism is designed to counteract the effects of external disturbances and actuator faults in combination with a reduced-order extended state observer. For the path planning task under the rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) framework, a reward component and angular factors are introduced to optimize the growth and exploration points of the extended tree under the consideration of the shortest distance, optimal energy consumption, and steering angle constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified through continuous task simulations of trajectory tracking and local path planning.