Ship Heading Control of USV using Model Predictive Control
Abstract
This paper focuses on control design of a Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV). The objective is that the USV’s heading angle has to follow a desired angle, while minimizing the energy usage. Here, the energy is used to move the rudder of the USV. The input variable is the rudder angle. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is applied to obtain the controller. The computational results show that the obtained controller is able to control the USV’s heading angle to the desired angle. Four scenarios are simulated and discussed and the best performance (i.e. the smallest error) is achieved.
Index Terms: Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), Model Pre- dictive Control (MPC), ship’s heading angle, rudder angle