Direct Adaptive Fuzzy Tracking Control of Marine Vehicles With Fully Unknown Parametric Dynamics and Uncertainties

In this brief, a novel direct adaptive fuzzy tracking control (DAFTC) scheme for marine vehicles with fully unknown parametric dynamics and uncertainties is proposed. The significant contributions of the DAFTC approach are as follows. First, in the backstepping framework, fully unknown parametric dynamics and uncertainties are encapsulated into a lumped nonlinearity function encompassing system states and virtual control signals. Second, the integrated nonlinearity function is further identified online by an adaptive fuzzy approximator that synthesizes a model-free control scheme (termed DAFTC) without requiring any a priori knowledge of the model. Third, tracking errors are proven to be uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) and can converge to an arbitrarily small neighborhood of zero in a finite time. Simulation studies and comprehensive comparisons demonstrate that the proposed DAFTC scheme has remarkable performance and is superior in both tracking accuracy and unknown parametric dynamics compensation.