Motion Control of Single and Multiple Autonomous Marine Vehicles

Worldwide, in the field of ocean exploration, there has been a surge of interest in the development of autonomous marine robotic vehicles equipped with advanced systems to steer them accurately and reliably in the harsh marine environment and allow them to collect data at the surface and underwater. Motivated by this fact, the first part of this paper proposes motion control algorithms (heading, speed, positioning, way-point and path-following controllers) for single marine vehicles. For the path-following controller, the solution proposed is based on an outer loop control structure designed at the kinematic level responsible for computing the heading commands to make the vehicle move along a desired path, and an inner loop that regulates the actuators so that a given heading reference signal is tracked. Simulation and experimental results with the Medusa vehicles illustrate the proposed control systems. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the cooperative control of multiple marine vehicles. The cooperation of multiple vehicles offers several advantages and leads to safer, faster, and far more efficient ways of exploring the ocean frontier, especially in hazardous conditions. The third part of the paper focuses on practical issues such as the implementation of the proposed algorithms in the vehicles, presents the software architecture adopted, and describes some graphical tools to supervise and manage the sea tests.