Vector Field Guidance Law for Curved Path Following of an Underactuated Autonomous Ship Model

Abstract

A vector field guidance law and control system for curved path following of an underactuated surface ship model is presented in this paper. In order to obtain the curved path, continuous derivatives piecewise cubic Hermite interpolation is applied for path generation based on the predefined waypoints. A heading autopilot controller is designed based on 2nd order Nomoto’s model and its stability is guaranteed by the Diagram of Vyshnegradsky method. The parameters of Nomoto model are estimated using least square support vector machine based on the manoeuvring tests. The vector field guidance law is applied for both straight and curved path-following control of an underactuated surface ship model. In order to demonstrate the performance, the classical guidance law based on line-of-sight, is adopted for comparison. The results show that the vector field method is capable to solve the guidance problem of underactuated surface ships.