Control of Marine Vehicles

This textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the control of marine vehicles, from fundamental to advanced concepts, including robust control techniques for handling model uncertainty, environmental disturbances, and actuator limitations. Starting with an introductory chapter that extensively reviews automatic control and dynamic modeling techniques for ocean vehicles, the first part of the book presents in-depth information on the analysis and control of linear time invariant systems.

The concepts discussed are developed progressively, providing a basis for understanding more complex techniques and stimulating readers’ intuition. In addition, selected examples illustrating the main concepts, the corresponding MATLAB® code, and problems are included in each chapter.

In turn, the second part of the book offers comprehensive coverage on the stability and control of nonlinear systems. Following the same intuitive approach, it guides readers from the fundamentals to more advanced techniques, which culminate in integrator backstepping, adaptive and sliding mode control.  Leveraging the author’s considerable teaching and research experience, the book offers a good balance of theory and stimulating questions. Not only does it provide a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate students; it will also benefit practitioners who want to review the foundational concepts underpinning some of the latest advanced marine vehicle control techniques, for use in their own applications.

Karl von Ellenrieder received his B.S. degree in aeronautics and astronautics, with a specialty in avionics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) in 1990, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University, (USA) in 1992 and 1998, respectively. Since 2016, he has been a Full Professor of Automation in the Faculty of Science and Technology at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy). From 2003 to 2016, he was with the Department of Ocean & Mechanical Engineering at Florida Atlantic University (USA) where, after being promoted through the ranks from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, he ultimately served as a Full Professor of Ocean Engineering and as the Associate Director of the SeaTech Institute for Ocean Systems Engineering. His research interests include automatic control, the development of robotic unmanned vehicles, human-robot interaction, and the experimental testing of field robots.