Trajectory Planning and Sliding-Mode Velocity Control for an Under-Actuated Hovercraft Vehicle

This paper presents a sliding-mode approach for the robust tracking control of the body-fixed velocities of an underactuated hovercraft vehicle. Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle is applied for an optimal trajectory planning – providing optimal state and input variables for feedforward control. Moreover, the design-related cross-couplings of the two control inputs are analysed and addressed by a heuristic approach. The performance of the proposed nonlinear control structure is investigated by simulations using an identified model of a corresponding experimental vehicle.