Control system of an experimental ASV: design and implementation

The control system of an experimental autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) is designed to solve the problem of control algorithm testing of ASV. The control system consists of two parts, shore monitoring subsystem and onboard control subsystem. The two subsystems communicate with each other through wireless communication system. Firstly, the performance of the ASV and the overall framework of the control system are introduced. Secondly, it is introduced in details that the functional components of the shore monitoring subsystem and onboard control subsystem and the implementation of the communication system. ARM is used in the onboard control subsystem as CPU, which acquires and processes the data of sensors including positioning data based on NMEA-0183 protocol from GPS and attitude data based on fixed protocol from IMU. The shore monitoring subsystem monitors the ASV in real time, which has such functions as the real-time display of navigation state and the real-time control of the ASV. And the longitude and latitude positions of the ASV are converted into the positions in X-Y planar coordinates in the shore monitoring subsystem. Wireless communication system is based on a pair of ZigBee modules, and a fixed communication protocol is designed to ensure the reliability of communication. Finally, the results of field experiments are provided to validate the effectiveness and practicability of the control system of the experimental ASV.