An Improved Active Disturbance Rejection Control Method for a Deep-Sea Aquaculture Vessel

To address the challenges of accurately modeling the motion of deep-sea aquaculture vessels under the combined effects of dynamic disturbances from the external environment and coupled disturbances from the liquid levels within the aquaculture tanks, as well as the performance limitations of traditional Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC), this study proposes an improved Active Disturbance Rejection Control strategy based on the ADRC structure, and applies it to the design of the controller for the dynamic positioning system of aquaculture vessels. Furthermore, to tackle the issues of numerous uncertain parameters and tuning difficulties inherent in ADRC, an Improved Whale Optimization Algorithm (IWOA) is introduced for parameter tuning. The optimization algorithm incorporates a chaotic optimization strategy and an improved adaptive inertia weight <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mi>ω</mml:mi> </mml:math> with nonlinear characteristics, which simplifies the complex process of constructing an adaptive function in the Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) algorithm and addresses the slow global search speed and poor local optimization ability of the traditional Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA). The final Simulink simulation results demonstrate that the ADRC controller designed with IWOA outperforms traditional WOA, GWO, and Genetic Algorithm-optimized ADRC controllers in terms of control effectiveness and disturbance rejection capability, improved the dynamic positioning control performance of aquaculture vessels.