An adaptive robust control law is proposed for the course tracking problem of ships in this paper incorporating a Nussbaum function and an auxiliary dynamic system into the adaptive dynamic surface control (DSC) technique. The ship steering dynamics is described by the Norrbin nonlinear model with completely unknown control coefficient, parameter uncertainties, and unknown external disturbances and input saturation caused by the rudder constraint. The Nussbaum function is adopted to deal with completely unknown control coefficient and avoid the controller singularity problem. An auxiliary dynamic system is introduced to handle the effect of input saturation. The DSC technique makes the control law be simple to compute and easy to implement in engineering practice. It is proved that the proposed course tracking control law of ships makes the course tracking error be arbitrarily small by an appropriate choice of the design parameters and guarantees the uniform ultimate boundedness of all signals in the closed-loop ship course control system. Finally, simulation results on two ships and simulation comparison with an existing adaptive neural control scheme demonstrate the effectiveness and the superiority of the proposed control scheme.

This work focuses on the robust leader-follower synchronization navigation for the under-actuated vessels with only independent the surge control force and the yaw moment. The ocean disturbances and thruster saturation are simultaneously addressed. A virtual vessel placed at the relative distance with the moving main vessel alleviates the requirements on main vessel’s velocity measurements. The disturbance estimation performance is achieved by utilizing the disturbance observer. The additional controls produce the filtered non-achievable command control signals due to the thrust saturation effects. The filtered signals correct feedback errors for avoiding disturbance estimation and rejection compromise. The dynamic surface control technique is employed to derive the under-actuated synchronization control laws. By employing first-order filters, the differential terms are replaced by the algebraic operations such that the control is convenient to implement. It is analyzed that the supply vessel control system is semi-globally stable and the synchronization navigation along with the main vessel is ensured with the small errors. Simulations in the different disturbance cases validate the synchronization scheme.

This paper focuses on the problem of optimal fuzzy output-feedback tracking control for dynamic positioning of marine vessels simultaneously with model uncertainties, unknown disturbances, unavailable velocities and thruster saturations. The control scheme is built by integrating a fuzzy velocity observer, a finite-time disturbance observer, a dynamic auxiliary system, the optimal control strategy with the dynamic surface control. The fuzzy velocity observer is constructed to obtain the unavailable velocities without requiring the certain model dynamics. The finite-time disturbance observer is established to estimate the unknown disturbances. The dynamic auxiliary system is designed to compensate for thruster saturations effects. By incorporating these methods, a disturbance rejection adaptive controller is designed with dynamic surface control. The optimal compensation term is inserted to minimize the cost function of the tracking error system by adaptive dynamic programming. It is shown that the optimal control consisting of the adaptive controller and the optimal compensation term guarantees that all signals in the closed-loop dynamic positioning system are bounded. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimal control scheme.

This article investigates the event-triggered adaptive fuzzy output feedback setpoint regulation control for the surface vessels. The vessel velocities are noisy and small in the setpoint regulation operation and the thrusters have saturation constraints. A high-gain filter is constructed to obtain the vessel velocity estimations from noisy position and heading. An auxiliary dynamic filter with control deviation as the input is adopted to reduce thruster saturation effects. The adaptive fuzzy logic systems approximate vessel’s uncertain dynamics. The adaptive dynamic surface control is employed to derive the event-triggered adaptive fuzzy setpoint regulation control depending only on noisy position and heading measurements. By the virtue of the event-triggering, the vessel’s thruster acting frequencies are reduced such that the thruster excessive wear is avoided. The computational burden is reduced due to the differentiation avoidance for virtual stabilizing functions required in the traditional backstepping. It is analyzed that the event-triggered adaptive fuzzy setpoint regulation control maintains position and heading at desired points and ensures the closed-loop semi-global stability. Both theoretical analyses and simulations with comparisons validate the effectiveness and the superiority of the control scheme.