Dynamically Positioned Ship Steering Making Use of Backstepping Method and Artificial Neural Networks

The article discusses the issue of designing a dynamic ship positioning system making use of the adaptive vectorial backstepping method and RBF type artificial neural networks. In the article, the backstepping controller is used to determine control laws and neural network weight adaptation laws. The artificial neural network is applied at each time instant to approximate nonlinear functions containing parametric uncertainties. The proposed control system does not require precise knowledge of the model of ship dynamics and external disturbances, it also eliminates the problem of analytical determination of the regression matrix when designing the control law with the aid of the adaptive backstepping procedure.