Path-tracking control of underactuated ships under tracking error constraints

This paper presents a constructive design of new controllers that force underactuated ships under constant or slow time-varying sea loads to asymptotically track a parameterized reference path, that guarantees the distance from the ship to the reference path always be within a specified value. The control design is based on a global exponential disturbance observer, a transformation of the ship dynamics to an almost spherical form, an interpretation of the tracking errors in an earth-fixed frame, an introduction of dynamic variables to compensate for relaxation of the reference path generation, p-times differentiable step functions, and backstepping and Lyapunov’s direct methods. The effectiveness of the proposed results is illustrated through simulations. © 2015, Harbin Engineering University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.