Low-Complexity Trajectory Tracking Control of Ship Autopilot System With Quantitative Performance Specifications

This paper is concerned with the trajectory tracking control problem with quantitative performance guarantees for a kind of ship autopilot system subject to model uncertainties. A novel prescribed performance control strategy is presented to cope with this problem. In the control design, a pair of novel performance functions are constructed, which not only offers a quantitative means to regulate the overshoot, peak value, settling time, and tracking accuracy but also guarantees that the initial condition holds naturally. In particular, the zero-overshoot attribute of the output tracking error is ensured when its initial value is nonzero. Furthermore, the presented approach is free of parameter identification, function approximation, or derivative calculation, thus rendering the controller structurally simple and computationally efficient. Finally, the above theoretical findings are clarified and verified via a simulation experiment.