A trajectory tracking robust controller of surface vessels with disturbance uncertainties

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.