Full state-feedback stabilization of an underactuated unmanned surface vehicle

This paper studies the stabilization control problem for an underactuated unmanned surface vehicle (USV) using only two independent propellers. Firstly, it transforms the whole dynamical system of unmanned surface vehicles into a cascade nonlinear system based on global diffeomorphism change of coordinate, and the stabilization problem of original system can be reduced to the stabilization control problem of a resulting cascade subsystem. Secondly, design respectively time-varying smooth full state feedback law via state-feedback and observer approach. Then, we demonstrate that the original system state is globally asymptotically stabilized to the desired configuration with the feedback control law. Lastly, the effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated and validated by simulation results on a model ship.