Planning and Control of Planar Underactuated Marine Vehicles Subject to Linear and Quadratic Drag

This paper tackles the combined problem of trajectory planning and tracking control of planar underactuated marine vehicles with different dynamic models. A reference feasible trajectory for the position and orientation is planned so as to be consistent with each of the three dynamic models. Using these reference values the dynamics of the vehicles is transformed to the error one. Partial state-feedback linearization, backstepping and non-linear damping techniques are utilized to stabilize the above system and force the tracking error to a set of zero that can be made arbitrarily small. Simulation results are presented and discussed.