Joint Communication and Control for Small Underactuated USV Based on Mobile Computing Technology

To satisfy the requirement of the future ocean communication and maritime transportation, in this paper, an integrated space-air-ground-sea communication control system based on mobile computing technology is proposed to rescue a water container. Specifically, unmanned surface vehicle (USV), as a flexible and lightweight intelligent device deployment integration platform, is the main tool to move towards the water container. However, how to sense the real-time navigation status information of the USV, integrate the information, and eventually distribute it to the ground control center, is still a difficult point for us. To successfully rescue the water container, three aspects of research are needed: information collection of the USV, information fusion, and data distribution to the ground control center. For the information collection part, we mainly use nine-axis, ultrasonic, global positioning system (GPS), and ultra wide band (UWB) sensors to complete the information collection for the USV. For the information fusion part, we set up a computational model to solve it. The USV computational model in previous works is mainly based on large ships, ignoring the modeling of wind, wave, and current for small underactuated USV. We use the classical Nomoto model, combined with the actual any slight wind, wave, and current forces on the USV, and finally combined with the proportion integration differentiation (PID) algorithm to model the USV. For the data distribution to the ground control center part, we have set up a communication protocol for the USV so that it can communicate normally. In addition, we wrote a Browser/Server (B/S) architecture to enable the ground control center to communicate with the host computer. Finally, our proposed control and communication schemes are carried out on actual USV. The real experiments show that the proposed schemes can reduce the ship surge and satisfy the ship navigation.