Abstract:

This paper studies the tracking control problem of underactuated ship. With a time-varying coordinate transformation based on dilation and the method for dealing with non-autonomous cascaded systems, the tracking control problem of a complex system is simplified by splitting it into two stabilization problems of simple subsystems. When the reference target converges to zero exponentially, globally K-exponential tracking controllers are constructed which is also effective when the reference trajectory is a line or a circle. Effectiveness of the presented controllers is validated in numerical simulation.

Key words: underactuated ship systems, trajectory tracking, cascaded systems, exponential stability