Robust Composite Nonlinear Feedback Path-Following Control for Underactuated Surface Vessels With Desired-Heading Amendment

This paper addresses the transient performance improvement for path-following control of underactuated surface vessels (USVs) in the presence of oceanic disturbances. The traditional practice that chooses the tangent direction of the desired path as the desired heading may deteriorate the tracking performance in the curve following due to the nonzero sideslip angle therein. Also, the disturbances in wave filed greatly affect the transient path-following control. To this end, three contributions are made in this paper: (1) an amendment to the definition of the desired heading using the sideslip-angle compensation is presented to achieve a more accurate path-following maneuver; (2) a novel disturbances observer-based composite nonlinear feedback (DO-CNF) controller is proposed to restrain system overshoots and eliminate steady-state errors while dealing with multiple oceanic disturbances with unknown bounds; and (3) the variation of the yaw-rate reference for path-following objective is handled in the controller design, which can enhance the vessel's robustness to the changing of the path curvature. Comparative simulations verify the reasonability of the desired-heading amendment and the effectiveness of the DO-CNF approach in improving the transient path-following performance of USVs while satisfying actuator saturation considering the unknown disturbances and changing reference.