Pre-Filtered Backstepping Control for Underactuated Ship Path Following

Robust path following control for underactuated surface ships is an important issue in marine control practice. This paper aims to improve the robustness of the close-loop system with model uncertainties and time-varying disturbances. A practical adaptive backstepping control scheme with a pre-filter is proposed to force a surface vessel to track the predefined path generated by the virtual ship. Based on the Lyapunov stability theorem, this algorithm can guarantee all error signals in the overall system to be uniformly ultimately bounded, and it can be implemented without exact knowledge of the nonlinear damping structure and environmental disturbances. The proposed pre-filter can smooth the commanded heading order and obtain a better performance of the waypoint-based navigation control system. Two simulation cases are drawn to illustrate the validity of the proposed control strategy.