Intelligent control of an unmanned surface vehicle

Abstract

The efforts in the development of Autonomous Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) has been growing. This is due to its maturing technologies and demands from the various communities such as the military, scientific field and commercial field. These demands came from human being’s dependence on the ocean, seas and lakes for natural resources, sea-trading and national security purposes. The communities saw the advantages that autonomous USVs have brought about in terms of reducing personnel requirements and improving work efficiency. In addition, autonomous USV also have noble benefit in eliminating harm imposed to manning force in high risk operations. However, in the present days, Semi-autonomous USVs are still more commonly used than the Autonomous USVs. Besides, the intelligent control of the USVs has always been a challenging issue for both the marine engineering sector and computational intelligence community. These shows that there are still many possibilities in terms of its capabilities and technologies awaiting to be explored. Therefore, this project serves to explore these possibilities by designing and developing a prototype of the USV with intelligent control to achieve autonomous capabilities. It focuses on developing the Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) system of the USV. Besides, the USV is capable of switching between the manual mode and the autonomous mode.