Finite-time sliding mode trajectory tracking control of an autonomous surface vehicle with prescribed performance

This paper investigates the finite-time sliding mode trajectory tracking control problem for the autonomous surface vehicle (ASV). A prescribed performance function is introduced to improve the transient and steady-state tracking performance simultaneously. Two PID-type sliding surfaces are constructed such that the closed-loop system can reach the sliding surface with good performance, on which the developed sliding mode controllers can make the system error go to zero. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, an application example of the surface vehicle CyberShip II is borrowed from Skjetne et al., (2005), for which detailed comparisons are made between finite-time second-order sliding mode control (2-SMC) and finite-time first-order sliding mode control (1-SMC). A large number of simulations show that the proposed 2-SMC algorithm can achieve better control accuracy in comparison with 1-SMC algorithm and existing results.