15th Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control
  Barcelona, 21–26 July 2002 
OUTPUT MANEUVERING FOR A CLASS OF NONLINEAR SYSTEMS
Roger Skjetne* Thor I. Fossen* Petar Kokotović**
* Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Norwegian
University of Science and Technology, N-7491 Trondheim,
Norway. E-mail: skjetne@ieee.org, tif@itk.ntnu.no
** Center for Control Engineering and Computation, University
of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
E-mail: pk@ece.ucsb.edu

The output maneuvering problem involves two tasks. The first, which is the geometric task, is to force the output to converge to a desired path parametrized by a continuous scalar variable theta. The second task is to satisfy a desired speed assignment along the path. The main concern is to satisfy the geometric task. However, the speed assignment will ensure that the output follows the path with sufficient speed. A recursive control design technique is developed for nonlinear plants in vectorial strict feedback form of any relative degree. First the geometric part of the problem is solved. Then an update law is constructed that bridges the geometric design with the speed assignment. An extra degree of freedom is provided for an operator to specify the speed of theta. A computer simulation with a marine vessel is performed to illustrate the design.
Keywords: Output maneuvering; Path following; Backstepping; Nonlinear control; Marine vessels
Session slot T-We-A21: Posters of Nonlinear Systems/Area code 2c : Non-linear Systems