A robust tracking controller for dynamically positioned surface vessels with added mass

This work concentrates on tracking control of dynamically positioned surface vessels with asymmetric added mass terms affecting the system model at the acceleration level. Specifically, we propose a novel continuous robust controller for surface vessels that, in addition to asymmetric added mass in its inertia matrix, contains unstructured uncertainties in all its system matrices. The proposed controller compensates the overall system uncertainties and ensures asymptotic tracking, while requiring only the knowledge of the sign of the leading principle minors of the input gain matrix. Lyapunov based approaches are applied in order to prove the stability of the closed-loop system and asymptotic convergence of the tracking error signal.