Global tracking control of underactuated ships by Lyapunov's direct method

This paper studies the global tracking problem for an underactuated ship with only two propellers. Under sufficient conditions of persistent excitation, two constructive solutions are proposed by application of Lyapunov's direct method. Both solutions exploit the inherent cascade interconnected structure of the ship dynamics and generate explicit Lyapunov functions. A common feature of the second solution and the recent cascade approach of Lefeber (Tracking control of nonlinear mechanical systems, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Twente, 2000) is that global exponential tracking is achieved, but at the expense of transient performance. Extension to unmeasured thruster dynamics is also considered. Simulation results validate the proposed tracking methodology. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.