Adaptive tracking control of underactuated vehicles with parametric uncertainties

This article discusses the tracking control problem of a more general class of underactuated vehicle systems. A new tracking controller is designed by decomposed the whole system into two interconnected subsystems. The adaptive controller is also proposed under the condition that some system parameters are uncertain. The global uniformly boundedness of signals and the convergence of whole states in closed-loop system are guaranteed under the present control laws. As opposed to the previous works, the assumption conditions for the systems in this note are more relaxed. The simulation example is given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed tracking methods.