Design, Implementation and Modeling of Flooding Disaster-Oriented USV

Abstract

Although there exist some unmanned surface platforms, and parts of them have been applied in flooding disaster relief, the autonomy of these platforms is still so weak that most of them can only work under the control of operators. The primary reason is the difficulty of obtaining a dynamical model that is sufficient rich for model-based control and sufficient simple for model parameters identification. This makes them difficult to be used to achieve some high-performance autonomous control, such as robust control with respect to disturbances and unknown dynamics and trajectory tracking control in complicated and dynamical surroundings. In this chapter, a flooding disaster-oriented unmanned surface vehicle (USV) designed and implemented by Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SIA, CAS) is introduced first, including the hardware and software structures. Then, we propose a quasi-linear parameter varying (qLPV) model to approach the dynamics of the USV system. We first apply this to solve a structured modeling problem and then introduce model error to solve an unstructured modeling problem. Subsequently, the qLPV model identification results are analyzed and the superiority compared to two linear models is demonstrated. At last, extensive application experiments, including rescuing rope throwing using an automatic pneumatic and water sampling in a 2.5 m radius circle, are described in detail to show the performance of course keeping control and GPS point tracking control based on the proposed model.