An Energy-saving Control Method for Path Following of An Unmanned Surface Vehicle in Wave Field

With the rapid development of the maritime internet of things, the unmanned surface vehicle(USV) as one of the nodes is playing an increasingly important role in the field of unmanned express delivery on water. USV is subject to wave disturbances during the path tracking process. Existing control methods often use high control gains to achieve good disturbance rejection properties, which will lead to considerable big energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy-tuned variable parameter proportional-derivative (PD) control strategy based on the line-of-sight(LOS) navigation law. The wave height and encounter angle detected by wave observation module are used as inputs to the fuzzy reasoning module for tuning the structural parameters of the PD controller. The fuzzy reasoning rules are established according to the influences of height, period and direction of waves have on path following of USV. The designed controller is analyzed for circular path following using the simulation data of irregular wave field and compared with the traditional control method in terms of tracking performance and energy consumption. Simulation results show that the proposed control method can effectively suppress the wave interference under level 3 sea condition and substantially reduce the energy consumption.