A Novel Heading Control Strategy for Unmanned Surface Vehicle

This paper proposes a novel heading control law for an unmanned surface vehicle subject to external disturbance. A robust heading autopilot is developed with trajectory linearization control algorithm and disturbance observer. In the past research, trajectory linearization control is often used in the field of motion control of aircraft. However, in this paper, it will be applied to the heading control strategy of the unmanned surface vehicle. The advantage of trajectory linearization control technology is its simple structure and the robustness of the controlled system can be guaranteed by dealing with external disturbance through a feedback term. Nevertheless, the ability of trajectory linearization control to deal with external disturbance is ultimately limited, so in order to further improve the robustness of heading control strategy, a disturbance observer is designed to compensate external disturbance. Finally, the numerical simulation results of keeping keeping and tracking are given to verify the feasibility and correctness of the proposed scheme.