In this study, a motion control problem for the vessel towed by towing ship on the sea is considered. The towed vessel does not have self-control capabilities such that its course stability totally depends on the towing ship. Especially, in the narrow canal, river and congested harbor area, extreme tension is required during the towing operation. The authors, therefore, propose a new control system design method in which the rudder is activated to provide its maneuverability. Based on the leader following system configuration, a nonlinear mathematical model is derived and a backstepping control is designed. By experiment results with nonlinear control framework, the usefulness and effectiveness of the proposed strategy are presented.

In this study, a motion control problem for the vessels towed by tugboats or towing ships on the sea is considered. The towed vessel looks like the barge ship, which is used for many purposes. In these vessels, basically, the power propulsion system is not installed but just towed by a towing vessel such as tugboats with ropes and wires. It means that the motions of towed vessel are basically dependent on the tracking route of towing boat. Therefore, in some cases, undesirable and unpredictable motions may be made by environmental factors such as wave, wind attack and so on. As a result, a collision accident with others may occur during maneuvering situation. Based on these facts, the authors try to encourage the steering performance of the towed vessel by using controllable rudders without any propulsion system. In this study, especially, a controllable vessel with three rudders is considered, and a mathematical model is induced for the future study. The model is described as surge, sway motion and inertia moment by following the general representation method for the surface ship.