Cooperative Control of USVs for Engineering Mother Ship Operation Scenarios Under Complex Sea State

In order to solve the engineering ships’ problem of difficult operation and low precision of cooperative control under complex sea states, this paper proposes a control strategy utilizing USVs to collaborate with an engineering mother ship for operational purposes. By using the nonlinear feedback method to improve the closed-loop gain-shaping algorithm, the tangent function is introduced to effectively solve the unstable problem of the control system for small USVs under complex sea states. Meanwhile, the motion of the mother ship is decoupled to establish the mathematical model of the headwind stationary state, and the improved closed-loop gain-shaping algorithm is applied to design the course-keeping controller and speed controller to effectively meet the dynamic positioning fixed-point control tasks of mother ships. The results show that the designed USV-engineering mother ship cooperative controller is effective under complex sea states. The control strategy is convenient and energy-saving, providing technical support for the improvement of informatization and the intelligence level of USV–mother ship cooperative control.