Cloud-based mission control of USV fleet: Architecture, implementation and experiments

Concurrency and Computation

Zhang

Yang

et al. 2021

Unmanned surface vessels (USVs) have been fully used in the civilian and military fields in recent years, which dramatically expands protective capability and detection range.However, the marine environment's complexity and variability make that verification of various advanced USVs control algorithms face high costs and high risks. In this article, we present USVs-Sim, a novel high-fidelity general simulation platform for USVs autonomous navigation data generation and control strategy testing. USVs-Sim is a collection of high-level extensible modules that allows the rapid development and testing of USVs configurations and facilitates the construction of complex ocean scenarios.USVs-Sim supports the steering or thrusting limits of USVs, as well as unique dynamics profiles. The platform can specify specific USVs sensor systems and change the time of day and weather conditions to generate robust data. USVs-Sim facilitates training of deep-learning algorithms by enabling data export from USVs sensors, including vision data, lidar, relative positions of ocean targets. Therefore, USVs-Sim allows for the rapid prototyping, development, and testing of USVs autonomous control algorithms in a complex marine environment. In this article, we detail the general simulation platform and testing several representative USVs intelligent control algorithms on the platform.

Section: Usvs Autonomous Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

USVs‐Sim: A general simulation platform for unmanned surface vessels autonomous learning

Concurrency and Computation

Zhang

Yang

et al. 2021

“…Bitar et al [18] studied automatic docking of a small autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) in confined waters in Trondheim, Norway by interconnecting an optimization-based trajectory planner which provides collision-free trajectories facing static obstacles and a dynamic positioning (DP) controller which can track the planned time-parametrized position, velocity, and acceleration. Wang et al [19] managed to carry out cloud-based mission control of the USV fleet.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Unified Approach for Underwater Homing and Docking of over-Actuated AUV

Zuo

Xiao

et al. 2021

JMSE

During the implementation of time-consuming tasks such as underwater observation or detection, AUV has to face a difficult and urgent problem that its working duration is greatly shortened by the limited energy stored in the battery device. To solve the power problem, a docking station is installed underwater for AUV charging its battery. However, to realize the automatic underwater charging of AUV via a docking station, the accurate and efficient completion of underwater homing and docking is required for AUV. Underwater automatic homing and docking system is of great significance to improve work efficiency and prolong the endurance of AUV save cost. In this paper, a unified approach that involves such as task planning, guidance and control design, thrust allocation has been proposed to provide a complete solution to the problem of homing and docking of an over-actuated AUV. The task-based hybrid target point/line planning and following strategy are proposed for AUV homing and docking. At the beginning of homing, AUV is planned to follow a straight line via the line of sight (LoS) method. Afterward, AUV starts to follow multiple predefined target points until reaching the docking station. At the final stage of docking (within 10 m), a dedicated computer vision algorithm is applied to detect a newly designed LED light array fixed on the docking station to provide accurate guidance for the AUV to dock. The sliding mode control technique is used for the motion control of the AUV allowing robustness. As the AUV configured with eight thrusters is over-actuated, the problem of the thrust allocation is very important and successfully solved using the quadratic programming (QP) optimization method. Finally, the simulations of homing and docking tasks using the AUV are accomplished to verify the proposed approach.

“…An Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) is a novel kind of multifunctional surface platform, which has been applied in many oceanic fields in recent years, such as ocean surveying, hydrology measurements, underwater acoustic communication, target tracking [1][2][3], etc. The motion control of USVs is a basic and essential part for autonomous operation, which has usually been inspired by conventional vehicles' control.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Practical Trajectory Tracking Scheme for a Twin-Propeller Twin-Hull Unmanned Surface Vehicle

Jin

Liu

et al. 2021

JMSE

Trajectory tracking is a basis of motion control for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), which has been researched well for common USVs. The twin-propeller and twin-hull USV (TPTH-USV) is a special vehicle for applications due to its good stability and high load. We propose a three-layered architecture of trajectory tracking for the TPTH-USV which explicitly decomposes into trajectory guidance, a motion limitator and controller. The trajectory guidance transforms an expected trajectory into an expected speed and expected course in a kinematic layer. The motion limitator describes some restriction for motion features of the USV in the restriction layer, such as the maximum speed and maximum yaw rate. The controller is to control the speed and course of the USV in the kinetic layer. In the first layer, an adaptive line-of-sight guidance law is designed by regulating the speed and course to track a curved line considering the sideslip angle. In the second layer, the motion features are extracted from an identified speed and course coupled model. In the last layer, the course and speed controller are designed based on a twin-PID controller. The feasibility and practicability of the proposed trajectory tracking scheme is validated in sea experiments by a USV called ‘Jiuhang 490’.