Sideslip-Compensated Guidance-Based Adaptive Neural Control of Marine Surface Vessels

This article presents an improved guidance law for underactuated marine vessels that compensates cross-track error caused by external disturbances through its sideslip. The proposed guidance law demonstrates improved path-following performance regardless of disturbances, such as waves, winds, and ocean currents. This article also presents an adaptive neural-network (NN) control law for the partially known vessel dynamics with state constraints. For satisfying the state constraints, this control scheme adopts an integral barrier Lyapunov function (iBLF)-based backstepping control technique. It is shown that the closed-loop system remains bounded, and state constraints are always satisfied. Finally, the efficacy of the improved guidance law and iBLF-based adaptive control strategy was verified in simulation and experiments using an autonomous surface vessel.