Stabilization of an Underactuated Surface Vessel via Discontinuous Control

The stabilization problem of an underactuated surface vessel is addressed in this paper. A discontinuous control approach with two stage control laws switched on at given time is proposed based on the stability analysis of the global transformed system. With the aid of terminal sliding mode (TSM) method, the two asymptotically stabilizing control laws for the transformed subsystems are designed independently. It is shown that the proposed discontinuous approach asymptotically stabilizes the underactuated surface vessel. Numerical simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.