Sliding-mode control of path following for underactuated ships based on high gain observer

A nonlinear robust control strategy is proposed to force an underactuated surface ship to follow a predefined path with uncertain environmental disturbance and parameters.In the controller design,a high-gain observer is used to estimate velocities,thus only position and yaw angle measurements are required.The control problem of underactuated system is transformed into a control of fully actuated system through adopting an improved line-of-sight（LOS） guidance law.A sliding-mode controller is designed to eliminate the yaw angle error,and provide the control system robustness.The control law is proved semi-globally exponentially stable（SGES） by applying Lyapunov stability theory,and numerical simulation using real data of a monohull ship illustrates the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed methodology.