This article considers the path tracking problem for underactuated ships with general form of dynamics including uncertainties. By introducing certain two polar coordinate transformations, the ship's tracking kinematics and dynamics can be transformed into certain two-inputs–two-outputs nonlinear strict-feedback form. To avoid possible singularity problem in the backstepping control design, we introduce an asymptotic modification of orientation concept. Presented tracking scheme can guarantee the uniformly ultimately boundedness of closed-loop system in terms of polar coordinates. For the convenience of comparison with previous related works, where all tracking schemes were discussed in the Cartesian frame, we carry out some case studies to investigate the conditions under which the proposed tracking method can guarantee the same stability and convergence properties of tracking errors in the Cartesian frame. Numerical simulation studies are also carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of presented tracking scheme.

In this paper, we propose a trajectory tracking controller with experimental verification for torpedo-like autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with underactuation characteristics. The proposed controller overcomes the underactuation problem by designing the desired error dynamics in a coupled form using state variables in body-fixed and world coordinates. Unlike the back-stepping control requiring high-order derivatives of state variables, the proposed controller only requires the first derivatives of the states, which can alleviate noise magnification issues due to differentiation. We adopt time delay estimation to estimate the dynamics indirectly using control inputs and vehicle outputs, making the proposed controller relatively easy to apply without requiring the all of the vehicle dynamics. We also address some practical issues that commonly arise in experimental environments: handling measurement noises and actuation limits. To mitigate the effects of noise on the controller, a filtering technique using a moving window average is employed. Additionally, to account for the actuation limits, we design an anti-windup structure that takes into consideration the nonlinearity between the thrusting force and rotating speed of the thruster. We verify the tracking performance of the proposed controller through experimentation using an AUV. The experimental results show that the 3D motion control of the proposed controller exhibits an RMS error of 0.3216 m and demonstrate that the proposed controller achieves accurate tracking performance, making it suitable for survey missions that require tracking errors of less than one meter.