Implementation of an Autonomous Surface Vessel Prototype: A Case Study

Abstract

As the growing demands and the rising of advanced sensor technologies, autonomous systems in a variety of applications including aerospace, surface and underwater vehicles have gained tremendous attention both in industry and research communities. Particularly, in recent two decades, there is incremental work in autonomous surface vessel domain, mainly focusing on the design of maneuver controller. Typically, the proposed controllers are non-linear and involve several parameters need to be carefully tuned, as a consequence, few of the proposed algorithms have been validated in a practical platform. In this paper, an autonomous surface vessel prototype is firstly implemented, based on the practical platform and inspired by the control design in field of autonomous ground vehicle (AGV), a simplified bicycle model is proposed and accordingly an angle-constrained pure pursuit algorithm is tried in ASV, from the linear course and way-point experiments results, it is verified that the proposed model and control algorithm is effective in the ASV with the accuracy up to 40 cm approximately.