Unmanned Surface Vehicle Chase a Moving Target Remotely Controlled

Shortly, it is expected to have hybrid marine scenarios in which manned and unmanned vehicles navigate in the same environment. The study of the interactions between autonomous and human-controlled vessels becomes essential to improve and make the control systems more resilient. For such a reason, this paper shows a simulation architecture to test the effectiveness of a guidance law in a target tracking scenario for surface navigation. The guidance logic is based on the idea of reaching and following a target when the future motion is unknown and only the instantaneous position and speed are available. The adopted guidance law can handle both the chasing and the following phases minimising the time needed to reach the chased vehicles. The actuators’ set-point generation is ensured by speed and heading controls, properly developed for this aim. A cyber-physical testing scenario has been developed and can run in real-time. Both target and interceptor dynamics are based on detailed mathematical models in which the parameters have been validated by dedicated tank experiments. An operator remotely controls the target through a human-machine interface and tries to leave behind the autonomously controlled interceptor to make the simulation’s results more realistic. At the end of the paper, the results are reported for investigation and the conclusions are drawn.