Tracking and regulation control of an underactuated surface vessel with nonintegrable dynamics

A continuous, time-varying tracking controller is designed that globally exponentially forces the position/orientation tracking error of an underactuated surface vessel to a neighborhood about zero that can be made arbitrarily small i.e. global uniformly ultimately boundedness (GUUB). The result is facilitated by fusing a filtered tracking error transformation with a dynamic oscillator design. We also illustrate that the proposed tracking controller yields a GUUB result for the regulation problem.