Visual Odometry-Based Robust Control for an Unmanned Surface Vehicle under Waves and Currents in a Urban Waterway

Abstract

This paper proposes the study of a robust control scheme for an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) in a urban waterway using Visual Odometry (VO) for position estimation of the vehicle instead of traditional sensors. For different applications, a USV is required to operate in autonomous navigation mode and under various disturbances inherent to its environment as currents and waves. To achieve efficient operation, a robust control scheme is required to cope with such disturbances. The autonomous navigation is achieved by using VO to estimate the vehicle’s position for denied Global Positioning Systems (GPS) environments. A robust control scheme based on Sliding Modes (SM) control theory is designed and its convergence is guaranteed by means of Lyapunov analysis. The tracking capabilities under disturbance conditions using VO for position estimation are verified in simulation using the virtual world tool from Matlab and Simulink.