Design, Modelling, Implementation and Intelligent fuzzy control of a Hovercraft

A Hovercraft is an amphibious vehicle that hovers just above the ground or water by air cushion. The concept of air cushion vehicle can be traced back to 1719. However, the practical form of hovercraft nowadays is traced back to 1955. The objective of the paper is to design, simulate and implement an autonomous model of a small hovercraft equipped with a mine detector that can travel over any terrains. A real time layered fuzzy navigator for a hovercraft in a dynamic environment is proposed. The system consists of a Takagi-Sugeno-type fuzzy motion planner and a modified proportional navigation based fuzzy controller. The system philosophy is inspired by human routing when moving between obstacles based on visual information including the right and left views from which he makes his next step towards the goal in the free space. It intelligently combines two behaviours to cope with obstacle avoidance as well as approaching a goal using a proportional navigation path accounting for hovercraft kinematics. MATLAB/Simulink software tool is used to design and verify the proposed algorithm.