Set-membership filtering approach for path tracking of an unmanned surface vessel system

In this paper, a set-membership filtering method is proposed in order to effectively track an Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) in a dual antenna GPS positioning system. According to the relationship between position, velocity and the heading direction, a mathematical model is established to describe the considered USV system. The disturbances of wind, wave and current are modeled as unknown-but-bounded noises and a set-membership filtering scheme is designed which enables the states of the USV to reside in the ellipsoidal estimation sets at each time instant. A simulation experiment is conducted, which assumes that the USV is still in the water with the disturbances of wind, wave and current. Example results are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.