Disturbance Compensating Model Predictive Control With Application to Ship Heading Control

To address the constraint violation and feasibility issues of model predictive control (MPC) for ship heading control in wave fields, a novel disturbance compensating MPC (DC-MPC) algorithm has been proposed to satisfy the state constraints in the presence of environmental disturbances. The capability of the novel DC-MPC algorithm is first analyzed. Then, the proposed DC-MPC algorithm is applied to solve the ship heading control problem, and its performance is compared with a modified MPC controller, which considers the estimated disturbance in the optimization directly. The simulation results show good performance of the proposed controller in terms of reducing heading error and satisfying yaw velocity and actuator saturation constraints. The DC-MPC algorithm has the potential to be applied to other motion control problems with environmental disturbances, such as flight, automobile, and robotics control.