Safety-Guaranteed Course Control of Air Cushion Vehicle with Dynamic Safe Space Constraint

Abstract EN

This paper develops a safety-guaranteed course controller for air cushion vehicle (ACV).

As the safety criterion, the unique safety limit of ACV including turn rate (TR) and sideslip angle (SA) changes with the speed when ACV is turning.

To be more intuitive to show the change of safety limit and more convenient for safety monitoring and control, dynamic safe space of ACV is proposed.

If the work point is within the safe space during the manual operation or automatic control, the sailing of ACV is safe.

Then, the safety-guaranteed controller is designed to keep TR and SA within the safe space during the course control process based on the dynamic safe space constraint, terminal sliding mode control, and adaptive mechanism.

The adaptive mechanism can effectively estimate the system uncertainty and external disturbances online without the requirement of their upper bounds.

The proposed controller guarantees the convergence of tracking error.

Simulations are implemented to demonstrate the efficacy of the designed controller.