Control of the hovercraft system: a flatness based approach

A simplified model of the hovercraft system, used in the literature to illustrate nonlinear control options in underactuated systems, is shown to be differentially flat. The flat outputs are given by the position coordinates with respect to the fixed earth frame. This fact is here exploited for the design of a dynamic feedback controller for the global asymptotic stabilization of the system's trajectory tracking error with respect to off-line planned position trajectories.