Control of autonomous surface vehicle for acoustic source tracking

Autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) is developed to fulfill requirement of many offshore applications. One of the examples is tracking an underwater target of interests. Tracking underwater target involves two general steps, target position estimation and target following. In this paper, a control strategy for ASV performing underwater acoustic source tracking is presented. Firstly, method of acoustic source position estimation is discussed. Secondly, mathematical models to represent the ASV kinematic and kinetic are developed. Thirdly, based on the estimated position of the acoustic source and linearized dynamic model, guidance and speed controllers of the ASV are developed to track the position of the acoustic source. The developed controllers are designed based on PID control structure. The performance of the controllers in tracking the acoustic source is demonstrated through simulation results.