In this paper, we propose an adaptive backstepping controller to control the exact position and orientation of a remotely operated underwater vehicle with parametric model uncertainty. To further improve the angular velocity control precision of each thruster, a phase locked loop (PLL) controller has been added to the backstepping controller. A comparison of two backstepping controllers with and without the PLL control loop has been performed using simulations and experiments. The test results showed that the tracking performance could be improved by using the PLL control loop in the proposed adaptive backstepping controller.
