Path-following Control for Autonomous Navigation of Marine Vessels Considering Disturbances

Path-following control is considered as one of the most fundamental skills to realize autonomous navigation of marine vessels in the ocean. This study addresses with the path-following control for a ship in which there are environmental disturbances in the directions of the surge, sway, and yaw motions. The guiding principle and back-stepping method was utilized to solve the ship’s tracking problem on the reference path generated by a virtual ship. For path-following control, error dynamics is one of the most important skills, and it extends to the research fields of automatic collision avoidance and automatic berthing control. The algorithms for the guiding principles and error variables have been verified by numerical simulation. As a result, most error variables converged to zero values with the controller except for the yaw angle error. One of the most interesting results is that the tracking errors of path-following control between two ships are smaller than the existing safe passing distances considering interaction forces from near passing ships. Moreover, a trade-off between tracking performance and the ship’s safety should be considered for determining the proper control parameters to prevent the destructive failure of actuators such as propellers, fins, and rudders during the path-following of marine vessels.