Active Disturbance Rejection with Sliding Mode Control Based Course and Path Following for Underactuated Ships

The compound control of active-disturbance-rejection control (ADRC) with sliding mode is proposed to improve the performance of the closed-loop system and deal with the constraint condition problem of a surface ship. The advantages of ADRC with sliding mode were verified by ship course control simulations. Meanwhile, to solve the path-following problem of underactuated surface ships with uncertainties of internal dynamic and external disturbances, the ADRC controller with sliding mode is introduced to steer the ship to follow the desired path. In order to overcome the cross-track error caused by wind and current, drift angle is compensated in the controller by designing a coordinate transformation equation. Simulations were performed on a nonlinear kinematics model of a training ship to validate the stability and excellent robustness of the proposed path-following controller.