Abstract
Due to the hostile marine environment, there will inevitably be unpredictable factors during the operation of unmanned underwater vehicles, including changes in ocean currents, hull dimensions, and velocity measurement uncertainties. An improved finite-time adaptive tracking control issue is considered for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with uncertain dynamics, unknown external disturbances, and unavailable speed information. A state observer is designed to estimate the position and velocity of the vehicle via a neural network (NN) approach. The NN is used to estimate uncertainties and external disturbances. A finite-time controller is designed via backstepping and command filter techniques. A multi-input multi-output (MIMO) filter for AUVs is established, and the corresponding MIMO filter compensation signal is constructed to eliminate the effect of filtering error. All the signals of the closed-loop system are proved to be finite-time bounded. An example with comparison is given to show the effectiveness of our method.