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arXiv · 2505.00168

Guidance and Control of Unmanned Surface Vehicles via HEOL

Loïck Degorre·Emmanuel Delaleau·Cédric Join·Michel Fliess
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Abstract

This work presents a new approach to the guidance and control of marine craft via HEOL, i.e., a new way of combining flatness-based and model-free controllers. Its goal is to develop a general regulator for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV). To do so, the well-known USV maneuvering model is simplified into a nominal Hovercraft model which is flat. A flatness-based controller is derived for the simplified USV model and the loop is closed via an intelligent proportional-derivative (iPD) regulator. We thus associate the well-documented natural robustness of flatness-based control and adaptivity of iPDs. The controller is applied in simulation to two surface vessels, one meeting the simplifying hypotheses, the other one being a generic USV of the literature. It is shown to stabilize both systems even in the presence of unmodeled environmental disturbances.

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Loïck Degorre, Emmanuel Delaleau, Cédric Join, Michel Fliess. 2025-04-30. Guidance and Control of Unmanned Surface Vehicles via HEOL. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00168

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