A Nonlinear cascaded controller for monodirectional hovercraft vehicles

Abstract

Working on surface environments, especially on the rivers, seas, swamp, using hoverscraft robots has gotten puch attention from researchers and commercial products. However, development of the automatic controllers for such the systems is a big challenge for scientific community. In this paper, we present a new nonlinear position control approach for mondirectional hoverscraft robots using cascaded velocity-based design. Dynamics of the robot has been first studied to obtain detailed information for the design process. The multi-level nonlinear control architecture is proposed to realize the world position control missions. A new disturbance-rejection technique and model-based nonlinear virtual control signal are employed to improve the control performance. The asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed by integral Lyapunov under strict conditions. Effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed controller were successfully validated via comparative simulation results.