SDRE Trajectory Tracking Control for a Hovercraft Autonomous Vehicle

A hovercraft is an amphibious vehicle lifted by a propeller that causes the effect of an air cushion between the vehicle and the surface. This way, a hovercraft becomes a fast and versatile vehicle to be used in different kinds of tasks such as rescues, environmental monitoring and coast guard patrolling. This paper presents the control problem formulation in order to track a reference trajectory of a hovercraft dynamical model. For this purpose the SDRE (State Dependent Riccati Equation) control method is applied to the model of this dynamical system. The nonlinear control problem is formulated in order to minimize the cost functional. Numerical simulations are performed using Matlab^®, so that, the equations of the system and the reference are integrated to generate data about the position, orientation and velocities of the hovercraft. The results confirm that the control method succeeded in controlling the hovercraft in all proposed cases.