Control of autonomous underactuated surface vehicle in the presence of environmental disturbances

This paper presents an output feedback design for a class of underactuated surface vehicles. Besides a standard controller, based on VFO (Vector Field Orientation) method, it consists of ESO (Extended State Observer) which estimates disturbances affecting the system and a partial dynamics decoupling. The estimates are used in a control loop to prevent the impact of environmental forces. The effectiveness of this method is verified with simulation tests.