Disturbance Estimation for Feedforward Control of Inland Vessels

The methods presented in this paper were designed to improve the performance of a control scheme for the automatic track-keeping of inland vessels. The performance of this control scheme heavily depends on the underlying models as it employs model inversion for the calculation of feedforward input signals and reference trajectories for feedback control. However, vessels on rivers are subject to model uncertainties as well as disturbances, such as cross currents or wind. Therefore, an estimation scheme was designed for the estimation of disturbances and their integration into the model inversion procedure. Simulation results show the usefulness of the presented methods for various disturbances and model uncertainties.