New Formulation and Experimental Validation of the Kinematic Guidance Principle on an Underactuated Uncrewed Surface Vessel

This work presents a new formulation and experimental validation of the recently introduced Kinematic Guidance Principle on a USV. While the original formulation of the controller was based on an empirical non-diagonal gain matrix, this new interpretation relies only on conventional control engineering techniques. It is shown in this work that the kinematic guidance principle provides a linear decoupled position error system, which is its main advantage compared to other guidance principles. Additionally, this work presents the first experimental results of the controller applied to a USV.