On the improvement of the Backstepping controller: An application on Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

In this paper, we propose to improve the nominal Backstepping control design through the addition of a disturbance observer estimator. We apply the proposed method to the trajectory tracking problem of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Furthermore, we prove the stability of the controller and observer set in closed-loop using the Lyapunov theory. Finally, we demonstrate the robustness and the efficacy of the proposed algorithm through real-time experiments.