Supervisory Switching Control of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle

A novel method to determine the switching of controllers to increase the performance of a system is presented. Three controllers are utilized to capture three "behaviors" representative of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). An underactuated nonlinear controller is derived to transit the vehicle between locations; a fully-actuated nonlinear controller is given to station-keep the vehicle at a setpoint; and a linear anti-windup controller is presented for the reversing mode of operation. Given a trajectory to follow, a performance-based supervisory switching control system (PBSSC) dictates the switching between controllers to improve system performance. Experimental results are shown that indicate that the PBSSC system is able to mitigate errors in pose better than any of the individual controllers.