Robust Dynamic Positioning of Marine Surface Vessels Under Denial of Service Attacks

This paper is concerned with the dynamic positioning problem for a class of marine surface vessels (MSVs) with model uncertainties and environmental disturbances, possibly subject to denial of service (DoS) attacks. To solve this problem, a novel robust control approach is proposed, consisting of a constrained controller and an integration compensator. The former is used to confine the internal errors within the predefined sets, against the model uncertainties and disturbances. The latter works during the DoS attacks to reconstruct the position information. In this way, the satisfactory dynamic positioning performance of the MSVs is guaranteed. Moreover, the control simplicity is preserved, i.e., there is no need to employ specific tools to approximate the model uncertainties, to estimate the disturbances, or to observe the system state. The simulation results on Cybership II illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control approach.