Pipeline following by visual servoing for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

A nonlinear image-based visual servo control approach for pipeline following of fully-actuated Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) is proposed. It makes use of the binormalized Plücker coordinates of the pipeline borders detected in the image plane as feedback information while the system dynamics are exploited in a cascade manner in the control design. Unlike conventional solutions that consider only the system kinematics, the proposed control scheme accounts for the full system dynamics in order to obtain an enlarged provable stability domain. Control robustness with respect to model uncertainties and external disturbances is reinforced using integral corrections. Robustness and efficiency of the proposed approach are illustrated via both realistic simulations and experimental results on a real AUV.