Adaptive Autopilot Design of Time-Varying Uncertain Ships With Completely Unknown Control Coefficient

This paper develops an adaptive course controller for time-varying parametric uncertain nonlinear ships with completely unknown time-varying bounded control coefficient. The proposed design method does not require any a priori knowledge of the sign of the unknown time-varying control coefficient. The designed adaptive autopilot can guarantee the regulation of the ship course to any prescribed accuracy and the global uniform ultimate boundedness of all signals in the closed-loop system. The effectiveness of the presented autopilot has been demonstrated in a simulation involving a ship of 45 m in length.