Development of a USV Testbed and Its Basic Trajectory Tracking Control

Abstract

In recent years, autonomous platforms have been developed to reduce the cost of various activities in the field of marine engineering, such as ocean observation platforms, autopilot vessels for maintenance of offshore wind farms, and the installation of submarine drilling rigs. Catamaran-type USVs are one of the useful platforms in these activities. The authors have been developing an experimental testbed of USV platform to conduct basic studies on control algorithms through sea experiments. The USV must be capable of following a given trajectory and accomplishing its mission in the face of wind, currents, and other unknown disturbances while avoiding other vessels and obstacles at sea. This paper presents our testbed design and LQR based control algorithm to implement the basic ability of trajectory tracking, which is intended to be used to collect data for designing AI based control algorithm in the near future.