Ship heading control based on backstepping and Least squares support vector machine

In this paper, a composite method based on least squares support machine (LS-SVM) and backstepping is proposed for the ship heading control. In the method, the control object is set up as the response model, which could consider the delay of the ship's steering gear. Firstly, a feedback controller is designed by backstepping, and a feedforward inverse controller is trained by LS-SVM. Then the backstepping method and LS-SVM inverse model are combined to form a new controller by adapting their output weights. Finally, simulations using a single backstepping method as comparison are made with different disturbances to verify the effectiveness of the combined controller proposed in this paper.