Experimental Testing of a Path Manager for Unmanned Surface Vehicles in Survey Missions

摘要

This paper presents the experimental testing of an intermediate guidance level for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV). The work aims to deal with specific requirements when the execution of survey operations is performed. The necessities in terms of path coverage can be different throughout the mission and the possibility to take them into account in the mission plan, thereby obtaining an appropriate and feasible path plan, constitutes an enhancing capability. In order to tackle the mission requirements, four different turn types are defined. The computed path is constituted by a sequence of straight-lines and circular arcs, hence allowing the use of existing path following methods. An architecture consisting of a payload computer and the unmanned surface vehicle C-Worker 5 by ASV Global Ltd, connected through a Robot Operating System (ROS) network and a radio datalink, has been implemented to execute sea trials and experimentally validate the proposed guidance. Experimental results are presented and the cross track error measurements as well as the percentage of covered path are considered in the analysis.