Active Modeling Based Course Control of Unmanned Surface Vehicles

Model uncertainties and external disturbances extensively exist in Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) systems, which will greatly deteriorate the autonomous ability. In this paper, a new kind of robust controller design strategy based on active modeling technique is proposed to attenuate the uncertainties pre-described in the coarse control of USV systems. Firstly, with detailed analysis, the uncertainties are introduced into the new-designed coarse dynamics model by using the concept of modeling errors; Secondly, Kalman filter is used to estimate simultaneously the modeling errors, which is subsequently used to design the robust controller; Finally, the new strategy is tested with respect to the unmanned trimaran vehicles system-Tri-0601 to show the feasibility and validity of it.