Trajectory Tracking of Underactuated Surface Vessels Based on Hierarchical Sliding Mode

Trajectory tracking is an importance practice in ship motion control field. It attracts more attention recently due to its difficulties. Trajectory tracking requires the ship to arrive pinpoint location at exact time. It is a underactuated system because the degrees of freedom of control inputs are fewer than the degrees of freedom that needed to be controlled. In this paper, a hierarchical sliding mode controller and a common sliding mode controller are proposed to deal with the trajectory tracking problem of underactuated surface vessels. Simulation results validate the tracking performance of the proposed controllers. The closed-loop stability is testified by the Lyapunov stability theorem.