Nonsingular finite-time heading tracking control of marine vehicles with tracking error constraints

Abstract

This brief copes with the finite-time heading tracking control for marine vehicles. The tracking error constraints, stochastic disturbance and dead-zone output are simultaneously taken into consideration in the controlled systems. To manage the dead-zone output issue, a smooth approximation model is brought in to offset the nondifferentiable phenomena during the control, besides, the adaptive technique and the Nussbaum function are simultaneously integrated into the design. For the tracking error constraints, the prescribed performance functions (PPF) with error transformations are designed, and novel stochastic Barrier Lyapunov functions are constructed accordingly depending on the newly tracking errors to deal with the constrained tracking control issue. To avert the “differential explosion” issue in the backstepping, the improved first-order filter technique is invoked. The proposed finite-time heading tracking control tactic renders that all variables are bounded, meanwhile, the tracking errors are kept in the pregiven boundaries. The effectiveness of theory results is substantiated via simulations.