Safety-Guaranteed Trajectory Tracking Control for the Underactuated Hovercraft with State and Input Constraints

This paper develops a safety-guaranteed trajectory tracking controller for hovercraft by using a safety-guaranteed auxiliary dynamic system, an integral sliding mode control, and an adaptive neural network method. The safety-guaranteed auxiliary dynamic system is designed to implement system state and input constraints. By considering the relationship of velocity and resistance hump, the velocity of hovercraft is constrained to eliminate the effect of resistance hump and obtain better stability. And the safety limit of drift angle is well performed to guarantee the light safe maneuvers of hovercraft tracking with high velocities. In view of the natural capabilities of actuators, the control input is constrained. High nonlinearity and model uncertainties of hovercraft are approximated by employing adaptive radical basis function neural networks. The proposed controller guarantees the boundedness of all the closed-loop signals. Specifically, the tracking errors are uniformly ultimately bounded. Numerical simulations are implemented to demonstrate the efficacy of the designed controller.