Tracking Trajectory of Underactuated Surface Vessels: a Numerical Method Approach

SERRANO, MARIO E.; GUSTAVO J. E. SCAGLIA; VICENTE MUT; OSCAR A. ORTIZ; MARIO JORDAN

CONTROL ENGINEERING AND APPLIED INFORMATICS

ROMANIAN SOC CONTROL TECH INFORMATICS

Año: 2013 vol. 15 p. 15 - 25

1454-8658

The main difficulty in the control of an underactuated system is that the system has more outputs to be controlled than the number of independent inputs. In this paper a novel trajectory tracking controller designed originally for robotic systems is applied for underactuated surface ships. A simple approach is proposed to track trajectories, knowing the desired state, a value for the control action needed to force the system to go from its current state to a desired one can be obtained. Its main advantage is that the condition for the tracking error tends to zero and the calculation of control actions, are obtained solving a system of linear equations. In addition, the convergence to zero of tracking errors and simulation results are included in this article.