Basic navigation, guidance and control of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle

Abstract

This paper discusses the navigation, guidance and control (NGC) system of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) through extended at sea trials carried out with the prototype autonomous catamaran Charlie. In particular, experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, both for precision and power consumption, of extended Kalman filter and simple PID guidance and control laws to perform basic control tasks such as auto-heading, auto-speed and straight line following with a USV equipped only with GPS and compass.

Experiments in dynamic control of autonomous marine vehicles using acoustic modems

“…The desired heading in MOOS is rounded to the nearest degree, and our thruster servo has backlash and stiction. MOOS Trackline performance is consistent with other works that use similar controllers, sensors and update rates [24], [25], and the S-PPC without packet losses is almost as good. The deterioration in performance with 50% packet loss is minor, which is surprising since there are many twelve-second and longer periods with no crosstrack information.…”

USV Trajectory Planning for Time Varying Motion Goals in an Environment With Obstacles

“…A basic guidance and control system of the autonomous USV prototype CNR-ISSIA Charlie is presented in [13]. The work demonstrates the effectiveness of extended Kalman filter and simple PID guidance and control laws to perform basic control tasks such as auto-heading, auto-speed, and straight line following.…”

Straight-Line Target Tracking for Unmanned Surface Vehicles

“…These include (Ebken et al, 2005), where motion control technology originally developed for UGVs is used to rapidly achieve basic motion control functionality for USVs, including modes for remote control and waypoint navigation; (Majohr and Buch, 2006), which details the development of a small USV intended to carry out high-precision survey operations in shallow waters, employing a steering controller based on traditional autopilot design methods; (Doucy and Ghozlan, 2008), where qualitative descriptions of advanced motion control capabilities for USVs are given, including dynamic positioning, wave management, obstacle avoidance, and fleet control; (Caccia et al, 2008a), which shows how conventional motion control techniques can be applied to make a small USV equipped with only a GPS antenna and a compass perform auto-heading, auto-speed, and straight-line path-following tasks; and (Naeem et al, 2008), where an LQG-based autopilot is proposed for a USV intended for environmental monitoring and pollutant tracking. Common features of these works are that they employ traditional control techniques and mostly consider low-speed operations in calm water.…”