CBF Based Quadratic Program for Trajectory Tracking of Underatuated Marine Vessels

Abstract

By introducing two polar coordinates transformations, the marine vessel's original two-input-three-output second-order tracking model can be reduced to a two-input-two-output feedback form. However, the resulting system does not confirm to the strict-feedback structure, leading to potential singularity when designing the stabilizing function for the virtual input in the recursive controller design. Moreover, the polar coordinate transformation itself inherently introduces singularities. To address these singularity issues, this paper employs a control barrier function (CBF) based approach and formulates the trajectory tracking problem as a quadratic program (QP) solved via a QP optimizer. Numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.