Ship heading control based on backstepping and Least squares support vector machine

Paper in proceeding, 2017

In this paper, a least squares support machine (LS-SVM) and backstepping process based method is proposed to control a ship’s heading. In the method, the control object is set up the response model, which could consider the delay of the ship’s steering gear. Firstly, a feedback controller is designed by backstepping, and a feedforward inverse controller is trained by LS-SVM. Then the backstepping method and LS-SVM inverse model are combined to form a new controller by adapting their output weights. Finally, simulations using only the backstepping method are compared with different interferences to verify the effectiveness of the combined controller proposed in this paper.