Control of Ships and Underwater Vehicles

Control of ocean vessels including ships and underwater vehicles is an active field due to its theoretical challenges and important. Most ocean vessels are underactuated meaning that they have more degrees of freedom to be controlled than the number of independent control inpu Ships do not usually have an independent sway actuator while for underwater vehicles there are often no independent sway and heave actuators. As a result, motion control of underactuated ocean vessels opened a new territory in applied nonlinear control, and attracted special attention from both marine technology and control engineering communities. This is the first book in the literature that offers various solutions to advanced feedback control topics of practical importance including stabilization, trajectory - tracking, path - tracking, and path - following for underactuated ocean vessels. The techniques presented in the book can be readily applied to other underactuated mechanical systems such as aircraft, spacecraft, mobile robots, and robot arms.