A Trajectory Tracking Robust Controller of Surface Vessels With Disturbance Uncertainties

TLDR

Marine surface vessels face unknown time‑variant environmental disturbances that challenge trajectory tracking control. The authors model ship dynamics with Coriolis, centripetal, and nonlinear damping terms, design an observer to estimate disturbances, and use vectorial backstepping to construct a robust trajectory‑tracking controller. The controller guarantees global uniform ultimate boundedness of all closed‑loop signals while enabling ships to follow arbitrary reference trajectories, as confirmed by simulation results demonstrating robustness to disturbances.

Abstract

This brief considers the problem of trajectory tracking control for marine surface vessels with unknown time-variant environmental disturbances. The adopted mathematical model of the surface ship movement includes the Coriolis and centripetal matrix and the nonlinear damping terms. An observer is constructed to provide an estimation of unknown disturbances and is applied to design a novel trajectory tracking robust controller through a vectorial backstepping technique. It is proved that the designed tracking controller can force the ship to track the arbitrary reference trajectory and guarantee that all the signals of the closed-loop trajectory tracking control system of ships are globally uniformly ultimately bounded. The simulation results and comparisons illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller and its robustness to external disturbances.