An Improved ELOS Guidance Law for Path Following of Underactuated Unmanned Surface Vehicles

In this paper, targeting the problem that it is difficult to deal with the time-varying sideslip angle of an underactuated unmanned surface vehicle (USV), a line–of–sight (LOS) guidance law based on an improved extended state observer (ESO) is proposed. A reduced-order ESO is introduced into the identification of the sideslip angle caused by the environmental disturbance, which ensures a fast and accurate estimation of the sideslip angle. This enables the USV to follow the reference path with high precision, despite external disturbances from wind, waves, and currents. These unknown disturbances are modeled as drift, which the modified ESO-based LOS guidance law compensates for using the ESO. In the guidance subsystem incorporating the reduced-order state observer, the observer estimation and track errors are proved uniformly ultimately bounded. Simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The simulation and comparison results demonstrate that the proposed ELOS guidance can help a USV track different types of paths quickly and smoothly. Additionally, the experimental results confirm the feasibility of the method.