Design of Ship Course Controller Based on Optimal Active Disturbance Rejection Technique

Because of the strong non-linearity and uncertainty, the dynamics restraints of autopilots, as well as the effects of wave disturbances, designing a high performance ship course controller is always a difficult work. In order to solve the difficulty, an active disturbance rejection nonlinear control strategy is proposed, and the genetic algorithm is used to modify parameters of ADRC online which improve the ADRC´s adaptive capacity. A ship course optimal ADRC controller is designed. The simulation results of ship course tracking and keeping show that the controller has good adaptabilities on the system nonlinearity and strong robustness to parameter perturbations of the ship and environmental disturbances.