Data-Enabled Predictive Control with Predictive Adaptive Line-of-Sight Guidance for 3-D Path Following of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

This paper presents a fully data-driven 3-D path-following framework for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), a representative class of underwater field robotics, based on Data-Enabled Predictive Control (DeePC). The approach eliminates explicit hydrodynamic modeling by exploiting measured input-output trajectories to predict and optimize future system behavior. Classic DeePC is employed for heading control, while a cascaded DeePC architecture with loop-frequency separation is proposed for depth regulation, extending DeePC to plants whose dominant output evolves significantly slower than the actuator bandwidth. For 3-D waypoint path following, the Adaptive Line-of-Sight (ALOS) guidance law is extended to a predictive multistep formulation (PALOS) that supplies the horizon-consistent reference required by receding-horizon predictive controllers. All methods are validated in high-fidelity 6 degrees of freedom simulation on the REMUS~100 AUV under nominal operation, ocean-current disturbances, operation beyond the data regime, and 3-D waypoint path following, consistently outperforming the corresponding state-of-the-art benchmarks. In 3-D waypoint path following, the framework reduces cross-track error by approximately 28\% relative to the ALOS-PI/PID baseline.