Concise Robust Control of the Nonlinear Ship in Course-Keeping Control

Most of the existing nonlinear ship course-keeping control systems are designed with the Nomoto model, which solely considers the yawing of the ship with only one Degree of Freedom (DOF), and it does not consider the coupling between the longitudinal and the lateral velocity of the ship. In this paper, a nonlinear ship course controller design method that can be used in a nonlinear coupled model was proposed. A stable nonlinear ship course controller with anti-wind and anti-wave interference was constructed based on the Lyapunov stability principle and robust control theory, which can be used in the course control of autopilot in the case of wind and waves. In this method, the coupling among the longitudinal and lateral velocity as well as yawing of the ship was considered. The simulation results showed that the method can not only effectively control the ship’s course but also can track the dynamic course effectively. At the same time, compared with the PID control method based on backstepping, the steering angle of the rudder angle of our method is smaller and the wear and tear of steering gear will be smaller