Fixed-time Trajectory Tracking Control for Marine Surface Vessels based on Fixed-time Disturbance Observer

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel fixed-time control scheme for trajectory tracking of marine surface vessels (MSVs). A fixed-time disturbance observer (FDO) is introduced to improve the robustness. Taking advantage of the FDO, a fixed-time adding a power integrator (FAPI) control law is employed to trajectory tracking control design. The proposed scheme can guarantee an MSV track a desired trajectory accurately, and the tracking errors converge to zero in fixed time under disturbances. Meanwhile, note that the convergence time is independent of the initial conditions. Finally, the performance and advantage of the developed fixed-time control method are manifested by comparative simulations.