Observer-Based Model-Free Adaptive Heading Control for Marine Surface Vehicles

In this paper, an observer-based heading control method is presented for marine surface vehicles (MSVs) based on model-free adaptive control (MFAC) technique. First, an adaptive observer is constructed to generate feedback signal, which avoids direct reliance on measurements from the heading sensor and enhances the robustness of the MSV under measurement noise causing by environment distraction. Second, by applying rudder input and heading observer data, the observer-based MFAC strategy is achieved for the MSV heading control. Meanwhile, to resolve non-self-balancing characteristics existing the heading system, the historical rudder input item is introduced into the control rudder criteria function of MFAC framework. The constructed heading MFAC method only applies the rudder input and heading output data and don’t require any model information of MSVs. Then, the stability of the observer-based heading control strategy is guaranteed by using mathematical analysis. Finally, the simulation results validates that the proposed observer-based MFAC strategy can achieve heading control task.