Design and simulate a Fuzzy autopilot for an Unmanned Surface Vessel

Autopilot system are valuable for many applications, such as: oceanographic, military purposes, maritime transport,… which offer greater self-adaptive capacity and cost-effectiveness compared to traditional systems. Especially, this is a common and an essential problem for Unmmaned Surface Vessel (USV) due to the non-linearity of the system and the changing environmental conditions. This paper focus on design, modelling and simulation a Fuzzy path-keeping autopilot for an USV with the modified Line of Sight (LOS) law compared to conventional LOS guidance. The heading deviation and rate of heading deviation are treated as Fuzzy inputs and the rudder angle command is the Fuzzy output. The Fuzzy-controller for USV is verified by Matlab simulation. The archived results confirm the effectiveness of the LOS approach.