Prescribed Performance Tracking Control for Ship Autopilot System With Course Constraint

This paper explores the course constrained tracking control problem for the ship autopilot system, in the case where the reference is not known a priori. The absence prior knowledge of the reference results in the classical prescribed performance control subject to course constraints unfeasible. To address this problem, we propose a novel prescribed performance control. A new-type error boundary is introduced in the control design. It is proved that the proposed control guarantees reference tracking with prescribed accuracy and constraint satisfaction simultaneously. The proposed control is free of identification, approximation, estimation, or derivation. Finally, a simulation study illustrate the above theoretical findings.