A global trajectory tracking controller is presented for underactuated AUVs with only surge force and yaw moment in the horizontal plane. A transformation is introduced to represent the tracking error system into a cascade form. The global and uniform asymptotic stabilization problem of the resulting cascade system is reduced to the stabilization problem of two subsystems by use of the cascade approach. For the stabilization of the subsystem involving the yaw moment, a control law is proposed based on the feedback linearization method. Another subsystem is stabilized by designing a fuzzy sliding mode controller which can offer a systematical means of constructing a set of shrinking-span and dilating-span membership functions. In order to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed controller, control constraints, parameter uncertainties, and external disturbances are considered according to practical situation of AUVs. Simulation results show very good tracking performance and robustness of the proposed control schemes.
