Terminal sliding mode tracking control for dynamic positioning J-lay vessel

Horizontal surface DP vessel model, ocean disturbances and J-lay pipeline model are established. Passive nonlinear observer is used to filter high frequency motions and give estimation for immeasurable states. A terminal sliding mode controller is proposed to implement tracking control task, the controller can drive the tracking error to zero rapidly and be robust to uncertain disturbances. Pipe and wind forces are counteracted by feed forward control term. The geometric and dynamic tasks are carefully designed to guide the ship carry out pipe lay operation successfully. Simulation case with a pipe lay vessel is studied to verify the performance of guidance-control system.