Robust adaptive heading control for a surface vessel with drift angles

The heading control of surface vessels is an important issue in marine navigation and control engineering. A nonzero drift angle is unavoidable when a ship is turning, and it should be compensated by the heading controller. The aim of this work is to enhance the robustness of steering control systems with un-modelled dynamics, parameter uncertainty, and time-varying disturbances. A horizontal-plane cascade-steering model with drift angle is proposed, and an adaptive backstepping control algorithm is developed to maintain the course-tracking performance of a surface vessel based on the dynamic surface control and Nussbaum gain techniques. This controller can ensure that all errors and states in the closed-loop system are globally uniformly ultimately bounded without any prior information about the nonlinear structure or external disturbances. Finally, simulation results are included to verify the good performance of this control method in comparison with the Lyapunov based heading controller.