Robust trajectory tracking control for unmanned surface vessels under motion constraints and environmental disturbances

To achieve a fully autonomous navigation for unmanned surface vessels (USVs), a robust control capability is essential. The control of USVs in complex maritime environments is rather challenging as numerous system uncertainties and environmental influences affect the control performance. This paper therefore investigates the trajectory tracking control problem for USVs with motion constraints and environmental disturbances. Two different controllers are proposed to achieve the task. The first approach is mainly based on the backstepping technique augmented by a virtual system to compensate for the disturbance and an auxiliary system to bound the input in the saturation limit. The second control scheme is mainly based on the normalisation technique, with which the bound of the input can be limited in the constraints by tuning the control parameters. The stability of the two control schemes is demonstrated by the Lyapunov theory. Finally, simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controllers. The introduced solutions enable USVs to follow complex trajectories in an adverse environment with varying ocean currents.