Weixiang Zhou

• Doctor of Engineering
• Assistant Professor at Shanghai Maritime University

As underwater operation equipment, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have received widespread attention in the trend of unmanned and intelligent operations. They play an increasingly important role in offshore oil exploration, underwater rescue, military reconnaissance, seabed salvage, and marine scientific research. The research and applicatio...

An effective path-following controller is a guarantee for stable sailing of underactuated unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). This paper proposes an event-triggered robust control approach considering an unknown model nonlinearity, external disturbance, and event-triggered mechanism. The proposed method consists of guidance and dynamic control subsys...

This studies the dynamic collision avoidance (CA) problem of unmanned surface vehicle (USV) under the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs, short for Collision Regulations). A more realistic virtual spatial velocity field and two-stage CA area are proposed to reflect the movement of the target ship (TS), and the headi...

This article investigates the problem of path following for the underactuated unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) subject to state constraints. A useful control algorithm is proposed by combining the backstepping technique, adaptive dynamic programming (ADP), and the event-triggered mechanism. The presented approach consists of three modules: guidance...

In recent years, the control synthesis and analysis of networked control systems (NCSs) have attracted increasing attention from both industrial and scientific communities, and many contributions have been published. With the development of advanced control theories, it has become a trend to combine networks with control systems. As a specific nonl...

In this paper, the formation control of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) is addressed considering actuator saturation and unknown nonlinear items. The algorithm can be divided into two parts; one is steering the leader USV to trace along the desired path and the other is steering the follower USV to follow the leader in the desired formation. In th...

This study presents a finite‐time spatial path following control method for a robotic underactuated airship subject to model uncertainties and external disturbances. A finite‐time path following approach is proposed by combining the backstepping approach with the terminal sliding mode control technique, and the upper bounds of model uncertainties a...

This paper presents a reliable intelligent path following control method for a robotic airship subject to sensor faults. Firstly, an adaptive backstepping sliding mode controller is designed based on the six degree of freedom model of airship, where the backstepping technique is used to obtain the desired velocities, and the adaptive sliding mode m...

In order to stabilize multiple-input–multiple-output uncertain strict feedback nonlinear systems with time-varying full-state constraints and external disturbances, an adaptive neural dynamic surface control method is investigated in this paper. A new compensator is proposed, which combines approximation error based adaptive radial basis function n...

This paper studies the spatial path following control of an autonomous underactuated airship in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances. Firstly, the nonlinear dynamics model, kinematics model and path following error dynamics model are given. And the control objective is formulated. Then, an adaptive backstepping sliding mode...

Airships are often under the risk of external disturbances, for example, the wind. The accurate external disturbance of the airship are hard to acquire. Typically, the super‐twisting observer can track the states for mechanical systems and could be used as an external disturbance tracker. However, the convergence rate of the traditional super‐twist...

This paper studies the station-keeping control of underactuated stratospheric airships in the presence of model uncertainties and wind field, and a T–S fuzzy model-based adaptive backstepping SMC (sliding mode controller) is proposed. Firstly, a fuzzy dynamics model is constructed to represent the local dynamic behaviors of the given 6-DOF nonlinea...

This paper investigates the planar path following control problem for an autonomous airship taking actuator saturation, actuator dynamics, parameter variation, and wind field into account. Firstly, improved nonlinear models of the airship are introduced and the control objective is formulated. Then, a command filtered backstepping controller combin...