An Assessment of a Modified Optimal Control Strategy as Applied to the Control of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle

Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) are now being used in a variety of missions including, surveillance, weapon delivery, shallow water surveying, coordination with underwater vehicles to name but a few. The performance of these unmanned systems is crucial in obtaining the required information from a given mission. The onboard navigation, guidance and control (NGC) systems, working in tandem, dictates this performance measure. Degradation in effectiveness of one system can severely affect the efficiency of the overall system. Hence the requirement of the NGC system is that of a robust type which includes fault tolerance as an integral part of the system. This paper presents results of the application of a modified optimal control strategy to an USV named Springer which has been designed and developed at the University of Plymouth for the purpose of environmental data monitoring. The performance of the proposed autopilot is compared with the standard control system in terms of real time results. Copyright © 2008 IFAC