Global tracking control of underactuated ships with nonzero off-diagonal terms in their system matrices (Q705443)

The authors consider the problem of designing a controller that forces the position and orientation of underactuated ships with non-zero off-diagonal terms in the system matrices and subject to environmental disturbances with constant or slowly varying bias for global tracking. A reference trajectory generated by a ship model is not required. The ship system's mathematical model is based on the following assumptions: the ship has the \(xz\)-plane of symmetry; surge is decoupled from sway and yaw; heave, pitch and roll modes, and nonlinear damping terms are neglected. The non-diagonal terms in the system matrices are nonzero. The ship is not actuated in the sway axis. The proposed method is based on the direct Lyapunov method. The controller is designed using the positive definite Lyapunov function whose time derivative along trajectories of motion is negative. This guarantees global asymptotic stability of the system and simplicity of the proposed controller.