Rudder roll stabilization with disturbance compensation model predictive control

Abstract

In this paper, a disturbance compensation model predictive control (MPC) method is proposed to reduce rolling and control heading of a ship with only the rudder. The controller reduces rolling and heading error by estimating the lumped disturbance consisting of external disturbance and model mismatch and compensating its impact on the output with control actions. A disturbance observer is adopted to estimate the lumped disturbance. The MPC controller compensates the lumped disturbance by calculating the control actions considering the effects of the estimated lumped disturbance. Simulations are carried out to verify the performance of the proposed controller, which show that the proposed MPC controller possesses a better disturbance rejection performance compared with an LQR controller under the variation of wave disturbances.