A Ship Control System in the Berthing Phase

This paper addresses the trajectory tracking problem for ship berthing using sliding mode technique. With significant potential advantages: insensitivity to plant nonlinearities, parameter variations, remarkable stability and performance robustness with environmental disturbances, the multivariable sliding modes controller is proposed for solving trajectory tracking of ship in harbor area. In this study, the ship position and heading angle are simultaneously tracked to guarantees that the ship follows a given path (geometric task) with desired velocities (dynamic task). The stability of the proposed control law is proved based on Lyapunov theory. The proposed approach has been simulated on a computer model of a supply vessel with good results.