A Practical Trajectory Tracking Scheme for a Twin-Propeller Twin-Hull Unmanned Surface Vehicle

Trajectory tracking is a basis of motion control for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), which has been researched well for common USVs. The twin-propeller and twin-hull USV (TPTH-USV) is a special vehicle for applications due to its good stability and high load. We propose a three-layered architecture of trajectory tracking for the TPTH-USV which explicitly decomposes into trajectory guidance, a motion limitator and controller. The trajectory guidance transforms an expected trajectory into an expected speed and expected course in a kinematic layer. The motion limitator describes some restriction for motion features of the USV in the restriction layer, such as the maximum speed and maximum yaw rate. The controller is to control the speed and course of the USV in the kinetic layer. In the first layer, an adaptive line-of-sight guidance law is designed by regulating the speed and course to track a curved line considering the sideslip angle. In the second layer, the motion features are extracted from an identified speed and course coupled model. In the last layer, the course and speed controller are designed based on a twin-PID controller. The feasibility and practicability of the proposed trajectory tracking scheme is validated in sea experiments by a USV called ‘Jiuhang 490’.