Design And Realization Of Unmanned Surface Vehicle Motion Control System

With the depletion of land resources, sea regions become more and more important. Unmanned surface vehicle (USV), as an important tool to explore the sea, has drawn significant attention from marine countries. Motion control technology is one of the fundamental problems in the research of USVs, and it is also the key for marine vehicle operations. The development of a low-cost USV motion control system can provide an experiment platform for advanced motion control algorithm. It also lays a solid foundation for higher performance of motion controller, and has important practical significance.A low-cost USV motion control system is designed and realized in this paper. It has the function of auto-navigation, remote control and graphical user interface. On the one hand, this system can provide theoretical verification experiment platform for scientific researchers. On the other hand it can also carry small marine detector. In this paper, the motion control system is introduced in three aspects.Firstly, the design process of hardware on ship motion controller is introduced. The process mainly includes hardware design and hardware driver programming. Hardware is the physical device that composed the ship motion controller. Hardware includes the main board circuit, sensor modules, kernel controller, wireless communication module and power supply circuit. Hardware drivers are the program in programmable devices which can pack hardware modules into sub functions. The motion control algorithm can realize the heading and path tracking control by calling sub functions.Then the development process of remote control platform is described. The remote control platform is composed of host computer and wireless module. The Graphic User Interface (GUI) is the main part of the host computer. GUI is programmed in MATLAB GUI Development Environment (GUIDE) which provides perfect compatibility with the algorithm in MATLAB. Extended algorithm realizes remote control function via algorithm extending interface and wireless module, and can receive and transmit USV motion status. At the same time, the GUI can also realize the function of path planning, manual control and curve plotting.At last, the motion control algorithm is investigated. The motion control algorithm is divided into guidance level, control level and execution level. The control level realizes heading control using anti-windup PID algorithm. The guidance level realizes path tracking using Line-of-Sight (LOS) guidance law. The effectiveness of the adopted method is verified by the experiments.