A Model-Based PID Control of Turning Maneuver for Catamaran Autonomous Surface Vessel

The effective automatic control of aerial, water, and ground autonomous vehicles become one of the high-priority tasks in the areas of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Industry 4.0, and the world economy in general. Besides extensive research on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), the study of Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) has been more than 10 times less intensive. The paper discusses the control mathematics of a realistic ASV nonlinear model of the real autonomous boat “Nymo” developed at the Tallinn University of Technology. The paper offers and simulates in Simulink/MATLAB environment a specially designed control system using a PID controller. The control for the desired tracking has been presented for such maneuvers as the turn of the catamaran at different angles. The proposed control system showed good performance in tracking the desired heading angles.