Adaptive sliding mode control for ship autopilot with speed keeping

The paper addresses an important issue in surface vessel motion control practice that the ship dynamics and sailing performance can be affected by speed loss. The vessel speed is significantly decreased by the added resistance generated by waves. An adaptive sliding mode course keeping control design is proposed which takes into account uncertain ship dynamics caused by forward speed variations, while avoiding performance compromises under changing operating and environmental conditions. The sliding mode control provides robust performance for time-varying wave disturbances and time-varying changes in ship parameters and actuator dynamics. After combining the unknown but bounded system uncertainties, the design of the adaptation law is obtained which is based on the Lyapunov’s direct method. Simulations on a ship with two rudders illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.