A novel active disturbance rejection control with hyperbolic tangent function for path following of underactuated marine surface ships

Abstract

This paper presents a TADRC method via active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) with hyperbolic tangent function for path following of underactuated surface ships with input constraint, heading rate constraint, parameters uncertainties, as well as environment disturbances. The line of sight (LOS) guidance scheme that computes the desired heading angle on basis of cross tracking error and a look ahead distance, converts path following into heading control, and also renders good helmsman behavior. Moreover, hyperbolic tangent function is introduced to modify the linear extended state observer (LESO) to design a nonlinear observer (TESO) for promoting the estimation performance of the heading, heading rate and total disturbances including parameters uncertainties and environmental disturbances. Then, the linear error feedback control is modified by a nonlinear sliding mode control scheme with hyperbolic tangent function to handle the heading rate constraint and to obtain the better control action. Furthermore, the feedback control law is embedded in a standard Quadratic Programming (QP) cost function to handle the input constraints including rudder saturation and rudder rate limit. Finally, the comparison simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method for the underactuated ship’s path following.