Trajectory Tracking Control for An Underactuated Unmanned Surface Vehicle Subject to External Disturbance and Error Constraints

Abstract

This paper is concerned with trajectory tracking control for an underactuated unmanned surface vehicle (USV) subject to external disturbance and error constraints. Firstly, a disturbance observer is constructed to observe the unknown external disturbance induced by wind, waves, and currents. Secondly, in order to avoid the “explosion of complexity” problem caused by virtual control variable differentiation, a first order filter and a time-varying tan-type barrier Lyapunov function (BLF) are developed. Then, by introducing the backstepping and dynamic surface control techniques, feedback control laws ensuring trajectory tracking are designed such that the errors of position and heading angle between the unmanned surface vehicle and a virtual leader converge to a bounded region. Finally, the effectiveness of the designed control scheme is verified by a simulation example.