A study on the autonomous control system for an unmanned surface vessel?

Recently, the applications of unmanned system are steadily increasing. Unmanned automatic system is suitable for routine mission such as reconnaissance, environment monitoring, resource conservation and investigation. Especially, for the ocean environment monitoring mission, many ocean engineers had scoped with the routine and even risky works. The automatic system can replace the periodic and routine missions: water sampling, temperature and salinity measuring, etc. In this paper, an unmanned surface vessel was designed for routine and periodic ocean environmental missions. An autonomous control system was designed and tested for the unmanned vessel. A GPS and gyro compass was used for navigation. A linear autopilot model for course control can be derived from the maneuvering model. Nomoto's 2nd-order response equation was derived. The design methodologies and performance of the surface vessel were illustrated and verified with this linearized equation of motion. A linear controller was designed and automatic route tracking performance was verified for yaw subsystem.