High-Gain Extended State Observer Based Adaptive Sliding Mode Path Following Control for An Underactuated Vessel Sailing in Restricted Waters

This paper studied the path following problem for an underactuated vessel sailing in restricted waters with varying water depths. A novel high-gain extended state observer based adaptive sliding mode path following control scheme was proposed. The high-gain extended state observer based line-of-sight guidance law was designed according to vessel kinematics in the horizontal plane, which achieved accurate guidance in spite of time-varying sideslip angles. In the guidance system, a guidance angle was calculated to serve as a reference input for the yaw tracking control system. The sliding mode yaw tracking control system was designed, which can deal with model uncertainties and external disturbances. Since it is hard to obtain the exact model parameters in advance, an adaptive technique was adopted to estimate the unknown parameters, and an adaptive sliding mode control was designed to make the yaw tracking errors globally and asymptotically converge to zero in spite of unknown model parameters, model uncertainties, and external disturbances. Furthermore, the global uniformly asymptotically stability of the closed-loop system was proven based on the cascade system theory. Lastly, simulation experiments were conducted to validate the analysis results and to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme