Precise Tracking Control of Unmanned Surface Vehicles for Maritime Sports Course Teaching Assistance

With the rapid advancement of maritime sports, the integration of auxiliary unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance the efficiency and safety of maritime education, particularly in tasks such as buoy deployment and escort operations. This paper presents a novel high-precision trajectory tracking control algorithm designed to ensure stable navigation of the USVs along predefined competition boundaries, thereby facilitating the reliable execution of buoy placement and escort missions. First, the paper proposes an improved adaptive fractional-order nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode control (AFONFTSMC) algorithm to achieve precise trajectory tracking of the reference path. To address the challenges posed by unknown environmental disturbances and unmodeled dynamics in marine environments, a nonlinear lumped disturbance observer (NLDO) with exponential convergence properties is proposed, ensuring robust and continuous navigation performance. Additionally, an artificial potential field (APF) method is integrated to dynamically mitigate collision risks from both static and dynamic obstacles during trajectory tracking. The efficacy and practical applicability of the proposed control framework are rigorously validated through comprehensive numerical simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that the developed algorithm achieves superior trajectory tracking accuracy under complex sea conditions, thereby offering a reliable and efficient solution for maritime sports education and related applications.