On the Properties of the Nonlinear Ship Equations of Motion

Nonlinear ship control systems can be designed by exploiting system properties like passivity and dissipativeness in nonlinear system. The nonlinear ship model is written in a vectorial setting with emphasis placed on matrix properties like positiveness, symmetry and skew-symmetry. As a result of energy conservation the ship dynamics can be considered as two interconnected systems. The first system describes the dissipative motion of the rigid-body (ship) while the second system represents the forces due to potential theory generated by the ambient water particles. It is shown that for a stable ship, both subsystems are passive as well as the interconnected system. For an unstable ship, the ambient water system is input feedforward passive with shortage of passivity and therefore the ship must be stabilized by positive feedback. The structural properties of the nonlinear equations of motion are exploited in the Lyapunov analysis when designing ship control systems.