Experimental results of Discrete Time Variable Structure Control for Dynamic Positioning of Marine Surface Vessels

This paper presents a Discrete-Time Variable-Structure Control (DTVSC) for the dynamic positioning system of a marine supply vessel to guarantee robustness with respect to disturbances and parametric variations. The control system is combined with a wave compensation based on a Multirate Extended Kalman Filter (MR-EKF). The dynamic positioning system is provided by a DTVS controller. The proposed solution has been tested on a real vessel and the experimental results are corroborated by simulations.