AN OPTIMIZED ENERGY-EFFICIENT PATH FOLLOWING ALGORITHM FOR UNDERACTUATED MARINE SURFACE SHIP MODEL

Abstract

An optimized path following guidance law is proposed for path-following of an underactuated surface ship. The main purpose of the proposed guidance law is to make a marine vessel travel with more energy efficiency. A combined feedback and feedforward controller is used for the heading control. The feedforward term is designed based on the well-known Nomoto model, whose parameters are estimated using least-square support vector regression. In order to achieve optimal operation of a marine vessel, a global optimization algorithm is employed to search the regularization factors, which are the trade-off between the total cross-track errors and total control energy. The simulation studies are carried out to demonstrate the performance of the proposed guidance law. The proposed method is an effective and practical guidance law and provide an optimal option for marine navigator.