Title: Synchronisation control for ships in underway replenishment based on dynamic surface control

Authors: Yongchao Liu; Jialu Du; Xin Hu

Addresses: School of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University, No. 1 Linghai Road, Dalian, Liaoning Province, 116026, China ' School of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University, No. 1 Linghai Road, Dalian, Liaoning Province, 116026, China ' School of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University, No. 1 Linghai Road, Dalian, Liaoning Province, 116026, China

Abstract: In order to ensure safe underway replenishment operation between two ships, it is necessary to keep the distance and avoid collision between the supply and the supplied ships. A virtual trajectory locating on one side of the supplied ship with a relatively fixed distance from the trajectory of the main ship is introduced. A nonlinear synchronisation control law is developed for the supply ship in the underway replenishment under environmental disturbances incorporating a robust term based on signum function into the dynamic surface control (DSC) technique. It is proved that the designed synchronisation control law can force the supply ship to track the virtual trajectory with arbitrarily small errors, while guaranteeing that all signals in the synchronisation closed-loop control system are uniformly ultimately bounded so that synchronisation motion control is realised between two ships. Simulation results on a supply ship illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed synchronisation control law.

Keywords: underway replenishment; synchronisation control; dynamic surface control; virtual trajectory.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAAC.2018.090806

International Journal of Automation and Control, 2018 Vol.12 No.2, pp.220 - 236

Received: 05 Jul 2016
Accepted: 14 Oct 2016
Published online: 28 Mar 2018 *

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