Approaching Control of Unmanned Surface Vessels Using Relative Position Measurement

To improve the control performance and safety of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) during close range operations, this paper proposes an approaching control method based on the relative position measurement system. The relative position of the USVs is calculated based on the measurement results and triangulation theorem. Then, under the condition that the absolute position of the USVs are unknown, a PID controller is designed to guarantee that the approaching unmanned surface vessel (AUSV) continuously approaches the target unmanned surface vessel (TUSV), while the inertial Kalman filtering technology is introduced to handle measurement noise. Finally, the proposed method is validated through MATLAB simulation, demonstrating its effectiveness in enabling AUSV to successfully perform approaching tasks.