Running control of ACV corresponding to the radius of curvature of the target trajectory

Abstract

A kind of an air cushion vehicle (ACV) is known as a hovercraft which carries out a cruise by blowing off the air from the bottom of the body. The ACV has many advantages, such as amphibian vehicle, large payload, and so on. However, the ACV has drawbacks such as its drivability is bad. An improvement of the drivability is effective for the control of the ACV and the disturbance rejection performance of the controller is very significant. In this research we make controller that can run along an arbitrary curve whose shape has not been determined in advance and can changes speed of ACV for each radius of curvature. And we verified usefulness of the proposed controller by running the simulation. Using various sensor and image processing technology we get control value which required for controller. We verified usefulness of the proposed methods by executing control experiments.