Abstract In this paper, a finite‐time trajectory tracking control strategy is proposed for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) with composite disturbances. First, to address the chattering phenomenon from unknown disturbances, a hysteretic quantizer is introduced, which filters out minor fluctuations in the input signal. Second, a finite‐time disturbance observer is proposed to precisely estimate the composite disturbances, which combine model uncertainty and unknown time‐varying external disturbances. Then, a finite‐time command filter is employed to derive the virtual control law while avoiding singularity issues, followed by the design of a backstepping‐based controller. By using the stability theory, it is proved that the closed‐loop system is finite‐time stable. Finally, the simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.
Li et al. (Tue,) studied this question.