Abstract
This paper studies the complete state tracking control of an under-actuated ship with only two controls, namely, surge force and yaw moment. A novel finite-time switching controller is developed guaranteeing that the ship can track a reference trajectory generated by a virtual ship. The solution is based on the inherent cascaded interconnected structure of the ship dynamics. As opposed to the previous works, the assumptions used in this work are more relaxed in the sense that the reference surge and yaw velocities are allowed to be zero at the same time. Simulation results are given to serve the purpose of demonstrating and validating the proposed tracking methodology.