NAVIGATION AND CONTROL DESIGN FOR CATAMARAN AUTONOMOUS SURFACE VESSEL IN GAZEBO ENVIRONMENT

Autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) are gaining popularity in various applications such as ocean exploration and water surface cleaning. Designing an autonomous navigation system for a catamaran-type surface vessel is challenging due to under actuation. This research presents the development of integrated Navigation, Guidance and Control (NGC) system implemented on the catamaran ASV to cruise through the waypoints while navigating the water surface. This autonomous system used Madgwick’s filter and loosely coupled GPS/INS integration to obtain more reliable states information. Digital PID controllers with back-calculation are designed for surge and yaw controllers. Lastly, a line-of-sight (LOS) guidance is used to track the desired path. A series of simulations were carried out inside the Robotic Operating System (ROS) Gazebo environment. Based on the results, a stable and fast response was observed for the yaw tracking controllers for surging and stationary motions. Meanwhile, noisy estimated velocity data caused small oscillations while tracking a reference velocity of 1.50 m/s, but the surge speed controller stabilized with a mean error of 0.01 m/s after travelling for 20 s. The ASV was able to track a straight line, whereas a circular and a curved-line path following’s performances varied with the curvature of the path.