An adaptive internal model control approach for unmanned surface vehicle based on bidirectional long short-term memory neural network: Implementation and field testing

This paper investigates a practical adaptive internal model control (IMC) for an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) with unknown time-varying nonlinear model parameters and environmental disturbances. Firstly, an internal model of the USV is presented using the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) neural network. Then, an adaptive neural IMC controller is designed for the trajectory tracking of USV by using the IMC method. The internal model and the controller are updated by an error threshold algorithm. The proposed control scheme comprises of a trajectory guidance module via the Line-of-Sight (LOS) guidance method and a tracking control module designed by IMC theory. Under the proposed control scheme, the development processes of the vehicle platform and the control algorithms are described, and accurate tracking control can be achieved. Finally, the results of simulation and field experiments are presented and discussed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.