Course Controller Design for Unmanned Surface Vehicle Based on Trajectory Linearization Control with Input Saturation

This paper proposes a novel course controller for unmanned surface vehicle (USV) by trajectory linearization control (TLC) technology, disturbance observer technique and auxiliary design system. First, TLC is a nonlinear tracking and decoupling control technology, which is a new control method in the USV field. Then a nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) is constructed to estimate and compensate for unknown time-varying disturbance. In addition, auxiliary design system is hired to deal with input saturation issue. All the error signals in the course control system are uniform ultimate bounded by Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and correctness of the proposed course control strategy.