Tracking Control of Unmanned Surface Vessels Based on Fully Actuated System Approaches

Considering the complication and high requirements of controller design in unmanned surface vessels (USVs) from the perspective of under-actuated model, this paper investigates the tracking control of USVs in terms of fully actuated system approaches (FASA). We firstly propose a high-order fully actuated (HOFA) model of USV for path tracking. Then, using the idea and method of FASA controller design, a control law is proposed to make the closed-loop system obtain the dynamic characteristics we expect and decouple it into two linear systems, which can be achieved with simple and easy computation. The proposed USV path tracking control law achieves global asymptotic stability without continuous angular and forward velocity excitations. The effectiveness of this method is verified through MATLAB simulation.