On Steering a Sailing Ship in a Wearing Maneuver

Compared to more conventional ships, little attention was given to nonlinear control design for ships sailing by the wind. Following our previous work, this paper addresses the issue of trajectory and reference input generation for a model that imitates the general behavior of sailing vessels. Specifically, we consider the generation of paths to perform a wearing maneuver. A feedforward controller scheme is then introduced to steer the modeled vehicle along this maneuver, and simulation results are presented as an illustration.