Tracking Control of an Underactuated Autonomous Surface Vessel Using Switched Feedback

This paper studies the tracking problem for an underactuated autonomous surface vessel. The research extends earlier backstepping designs for underactuated systems by constructing a switched feedback control law to achieve global tracking. The control law avoids singularities arising from coordinate transformations used to describe the surface vessel dynamics in second-order chained form. The paper provides a detailed derivation of the control law. Simulation examples are included to illustrate the effectiveness of the tracking controller