Supervisory Switching Control of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle
This addresses control challenges for USVs, but it is incremental as it builds on existing controller designs with a novel switching method.
The paper tackled the problem of improving unmanned surface vehicle (USV) performance by switching between controllers for different behaviors, resulting in a supervisory system that reduced pose errors better than individual controllers.
A novel method to determine the switching of controllers to increase the performance of a system is presented. Three controllers are utilized to capture three behaviors representative of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). An underactuated nonlinear controller is derived to transit the vehicle between locations; a fully-actuated nonlinear controller is given to station-keep the vehicle at a setpoint; and a linear anti-windup controller is presented for the reversing mode of operation. Given a trajectory to follow, a performance-based supervisory switching control system (PBSSC) dictates the switching between controllers to improve system performance. Experimental results are shown that indicate that the PBSSC system is able to mitigate errors in pose better than any of the individual controllers.