ESO-Based Line-of-Sight Guidance Law for Path Following of Underactuated Marine Surface Vehicles With Exact Sideslip Compensation

This paper presents a novel extended state observer (ESO)-based line-of-sight guidance law for path following of underactuated marine surface vehicles in the presence of time-varying sideslip angle. A reduced-order ESO is employed to identify the vehicle sideslip angle caused by constant ocean disturbances when following a curved path or time-varying ocean disturbances. This guarantees that the sideslip angle can be timely and exactly estimated, and thus contributes to following the desired path with higher accuracy regardless of external disturbances induced by wind, waves, and ocean currents. The input-to-state stability of the closed-loop system is established via cascade theory. It is proven that the transient learning process can be shorten by increasing the bandwidth of the ESO. Both simulation and experimental results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the method.