Semi-global practical stabilization and disturbance adaptation for an underactuated ship

Abstract

We consider the problem of stabilizing the position and orientation of a ship to constant desired values, when the ship has only two independent controls and also the ship is subject to an environmental force of unknown magnitude. We propose a time-varying feedback control law and a disturbance adaptation law, and show that this provides semi-global practical asymptotic stability. The control and adaptation laws are derived using a combined integrator backstepping and averaging approach. Simulation results are presented.