Adaptive Learning Based Tracking Control of Marine Vessels with Prescribed Performance

A novel adaptive tracking controller of fully actuated marine vessels is proposed with completely unknown dynamics and external disturbances. The model of dominant dynamic behaviors and unknown disturbances of the vessel are learned by a neural network in real time. The controller is designed and it unifies backstepping and adaptive neural network techniques with predefined tracking performance constraints on the tracking convergence rate and the transient and steady-state tracking error. The stability of the proposed adaptive tracking controller of the vessel is proven with a uniformly bounded tracking error. The proposed adaptive tracking controller is shown to be effective in the tracking control of marine vessels by simulations.