Unmanned Surface Vehicle Path Following Based on Model Predictive Control

To deal with the challenging problem of unmanned surface vehicle (USV) path following, a method based on model predictive control (MPC) is designed in this paper. An USV is a typical nonholonomic constrained and under-actuated system, and it has huge inertia while there is no effective brake system to control its drift. In order to follow a given path better, prediction based method should be used to take the future states into account. The kinetic model of USV has been established to simulate the prediction horizon while the inertia and hydrodynamic forces are considered. Numerical simulations are carried out and demonstrate that the controller can command the USV to follow a series of waypoints smoothly and accurately.