Variable Gain Prescribed Performance Control for Dynamic Positioning of Ships with Positioning Error Constraints

In this paper, a variable gain prescribed performance control law is proposed for dynamic positioning (DP) of ships with positioning error constraints, input saturation and unknown external disturbances. The error performance index functions are designed to preset the prescribed performance bounds and the error mapping functions are constructed to incorporate the prescribed performance bounds into the DP control design. The variable gain technique is used to limit the output amplitude of the control law to avoid input saturation of the system by dynamically adjusting the control gain of the DP control law according to the positioning errors, and the error mapping function replaces the positioning error as a recursive sliding-mode surface to realize the prescribed performance control of the system and guarantee the stability of the closed-loop system with variable control gains. It has been proved that the proposed DP control law can make the uniformly ultimately boundedness of all signals in the DP closed-loop control system. The numerical simulation results illustrate that the proposed control law can make the ship’s position and heading maintain at the desired value with positioning error constraints, enhance the non-fragility of the DP control law to the perturbation of system’s parameters and improve the system’s rejection ability to external disturbances.

Composite Observer-Based Adaptive Dynamic Surface Control for Fractional-Order Nonlinear Systems with Input Saturation

This article proposes an adaptive neural output feedback control scheme in combination with state and disturbance observers for uncertain fractional-order nonlinear systems containing unknown external disturbance, input saturation and immeasurable state. The radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) approximation is used to estimate unknown nonlinear function, and a state observer as well as a fractional-order disturbance observer is developed simultaneously by using the approximation output of the RBFNN to estimate immeasurable states and unknown compounded disturbances, respectively. Then, a fractional-order auxiliary system is constructed to compensate the effects caused by the saturated input. In addition, by introducing a dynamic surface control strategy, the tedious analytic computation of time derivatives of virtual control laws in the conventional backstepping method is avoided. The proposed method guarantees that the boundness of all signals in the closed loop system and the tracking errors converge to a small neighbourhood around the origin. Finally, two examples are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method.

The Stability of the Systems with Command Saturation, Command Delay, and State Delay

This article presents the study of the stability of single-input and multiple-input systems with point or distributed state delay and input delay and input saturation. By a linear transformation applied to the initial system with delay, a system is obtained without delay, but which is equivalent from the point of view of stability. Next, using sufficient conditions for the global asymptotic stability of linear systems with bounded control, new sufficient conditions are obtained for global asymptotic stability of the initial system with state delay and input delay and input saturation. In addition, the article presents the results on the instability and estimation of the stability region of the delay and input saturation system. The numerical simulations confirming the results obtained on stability were performed in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. A method is also presented for solving a transcendental matrix equation that results from the process of equating the stability of the systems with and without delay, a method which is based on the computational intelligence, namely, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method.

Nonlinear repetitive control of the metal cutting machine feed module with saturated input

The article discusses the methodology for constructing an automatic control system for the feed module of the cutting tool for lathes in the presence of input saturation. The presence of the saturation function is due to restrict unwanted movements of the feed module actuator. The generator for periodic signals, the hyperstability criterion, L-dissipativity conditions and an implicit reference model are used as the solution methods for structural synthesis of the control system. At the stage of simulation, the functioning quality of the developed control system is illustrated.

Adaptive finite-time tracking control for full state constrained nonlinear systems with time-varying delays and input saturation

This paper investigates the adaptive finite-time tracking control problem for a class of nonlinear full state constrained systems with time-varying delays and input saturation. Compared with the previously published work, the considered system involves unknown time-varying delays, asymmetric input saturation, and time-varying asymmetric full state constraints. To ensure the state constraint satisfaction, the appropriate time-varying asymmetric Barrier Lyapunov Functions and the backstepping technique are utilized. Meanwhile, the finite covering lemma and the radial basis function neural networks are employed to solve the unknown time-varying delays. The assumption that the time derivative of time-varying delay functions is required to be less than one in traditional Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals is removed by the proposed method. Moreover, the asymmetric input saturation is handled by an auxiliary design system. Taking the norm of the neural network weight vector as an adaptive parameter, a novel adaptive finite-time tracking controller with minimal learning parameters is constructed. It is proved that the proposed controller can guarantee that all signals in the closed-loop system are bounded, all states are constrained within the predefined sets, and the tracking error converges to a small neighborhood of the origin in a finite time. Finally, a comparison study simulation is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed strategy. The simulation results show that our proposed strategy has good advantages of high tracking precision and disturbance rejection.