Tracking control of surface ships with disturbance and uncertainties rejection capability

This paper investigates a difficult problem of tracking control manipulation for surface ships. External disturbances and system uncertainties are simultaneously addressed. The tracking law design is accomplished in a framework of backstepping control. First, a backsteppingbased controller is presented to achieve trajectory tracking with desired tracking performance guaranteed. On the basis of this baseline feedback control law, an adaptive version of this controller is further synthesized to handle the uncertainties and disturbances. It is shown by the Lyapunov stability analysis that the closed-loop tracking system is guaranteed to be asymptotically stable. The desired trajectory is successfully followed with the tracking error asymptotically converging to zero. The effectiveness of the controller is validated through a numerical example.