Trajectory tracking control of autonomous underactuated hovercraft vehicles with limited torque

This paper addresses trajectory tracking control of hovercraft vehicles in the presence of actuator constraints. A saturated tracking controller is designed by utilizing hyperbolic tangent functions to reduce the risk of actuator saturation. Adaptive robust techniques are adopted to guarantee the robustness of the control system against unknown parameters and external disturbances. A Lyapunov-based stability analysis shows that all signals of the closed-loop system are bounded and tracking errors are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded. Finally, simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.