Nonlinear Adaptive Ship Control Synthesis In The Case Of Model Uncertainty

This chapter covers the concerns with a problem of adaptive ship control synthesis in the case of substantially limited knowledge of the plant model. In fact we have at our disposal only its highly general structure in the form of Norrbin’s-like representation with unknown nonlinearities. Two tasks of ship control are considered. The first task is concerning the ship course-keeping system design while the second refers to the path-following system. Two different approaches to the control synthesis problem are considered. One is based on an adaptive feedback linearization technique, while the second refers to the backstepping method where the tuning of unknown parameters is also taken into account. It has been demonstrated that the controllers thereby obtained enable on-line learning of unknown model characteristics, having at the same time the performance comparable to the case of fully known model parameters. The system’s performance assessment for the each case has been tested via Matlab/Simulink simulations.