NONLINEAR PATH FOLLOWING CONTROL OF FULLY ACTUATED MARINE VEHICLES WITH PARAMETER UNCERTAINTY

Abstract The paper addresses the problem of steering a fully actuated marine vehicle along a desired path. The methodology adopted for path following control deals explicitly with vehicle dynamics and plant parameter uncertainty. Furthermore, it avoids tight constraints on initial conditions that are present in other approaches reported in the literature. The main contribution of the paper is the development of an efficient two-stage procedure: first, a path following control law is designed based on the kinematics only; this is followed by the design of a robustly stabilizing controller for the vehicle dynamics. A coupling term in the final dynamic control law that emerges naturally out of the design procedure ensures stability of the resulting closed-loop system. Simulation results illustrate the performance of the control system proposed.

[1]  Antonio M. Pascoal,et al.  Nonlinear path following with applications to the control of autonomous underwater vehicles , 2003, 42nd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37475).

[2]  Giuseppe Casalino,et al.  A planar path following controller for underactuated marine vehicles , 2001 .

[3]  P. Encarnacao,et al.  3D path following for autonomous underwater vehicle , 2000, Proceedings of the 39th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Cat. No.00CH37187).

[4]  Thor I. Fossen,et al.  Passive nonlinear observer design for ships using Lyapunov methods: full-scale experiments with a supply vessel , 1999, Autom..

[5]  Thor I. Fossen,et al.  Marine Control Systems Guidance, Navigation, and Control of Ships, Rigs and Underwater Vehicles , 2002 .

[6]  Antonio M. Pascoal,et al.  Adaptive, non-singular path-following control of dynamic wheeled robots , 2003, 42nd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37475).

[7]  E. Yaz.  Linear Matrix Inequalities In System And Control Theory , 1998, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[8]  Thor I. Fossen,et al.  Guidance and control of ocean vehicles , 1994 .

[9]  Pedro Encarnação,et al.  Path Following for Marine Vehicles in the Presence of Unknown Currents 1 , 2000 .

[10]  L. Ghaoui,et al.  History of linear matrix inequalities in control theory , 1994, Proceedings of 1994 American Control Conference - ACC '94.

[11]  Stephen P. Boyd,et al.  Linear Matrix Inequalities in Systems and Control Theory , 1994 .