A Fuzzy Self-Adaptive PID Tracking Control of Autonomous Surface Vehicle

Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller is a conventional controller, which is widely used in industrial control system. In this paper, a PID control system is used for path tracking of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV). The PID controller is selected because it is easy to implement as an embedded controller and practically easy to understand compared to other control methods. However, to improve the response of the PID controller, a fuzzy inference system (FIS) is used to tune the controller parameters based on a set of control rules. Three parallel fuzzy self-adaptive PID controllers is used to track the desired position and angular orientation of the ASV along the surge, sway and yaw directions. Through kinematic modeling of the ASV, the desired model for tracking the desired path could be obtained. Simulation results show that the Fuzzy-PID controller performs better compared to the ordinary PID controller in term of improving settling time and reducing overshoot of the control signal.