ADP-based adaptive control of ship course tracking system with prescribed performance

In this paper, an adaptive dynamic programing (ADP)-based adaptive control problem is studied for the ship course tracking system with prescribed performance. Firstly, the complex sea conditions will bring difficulty to ship course tracking when unmanned ship sailing on sea. In order to overcome this difficulty, a prescribed performance feedforward term is designed in the controller to improve the course tracking ability of ship. Secondly, by defining a cost function, an ADP technology is exploited to achieve an optimal control of ship course tracking system. Finally, the stability of the closed loop system is turned out by Lyapunov stability theory and all signals are uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB). Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.