Sliding mode control design for autonomous surface vehicle motion under the influence of environmental factor

Abstract

Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) is a vehicle that is operated in the water surface without any person in the vehicle. Since there is no person in the ASV, a motion controller is essentially needed. The control system is used to make sure that the water vehicle is moving at the desired speed. In this paper, we use a Touristant ASV with the following specifications: the length is 4 meters, the diameter is 1.625 meters, and the height is 1.027 meters. The main contribution of this paper is applying the Sliding Mode Control system to the Touristant ASV model under the influence of environmental factors. The environmental factors considered in this work are wind speed and wave height. The Touristant ASV model is nonlinear and uses three degree of freedom (DOF), namely surge, sway and yaw. The simulation results show that the performance of the closed-loop system by using the SMC method depends on the environmental factors. If environmental factors are higher, then the resulting error is also higher. The average error difference between those resulted from the simulation without environmental factors and those with the influence of environmental factors is 0.05% for surge, sway and yaw motions.