Tuning Marine Vehicles' Guidance Controllers through Self-Oscillation Experiments

This paper demonstrates the use of self-oscillation identification experiments for tuning heading and line following controllers for marine vehicles. The identification by use of self-oscillations (IS-O) has been developed for general LTI systems and for a class of nonlinear systems and it was used for tuning guidance controllers. The guidance controllers have been tuned using the results from IS-O experiments. Heading controller algorithm that gives smooth control output is presented. The line following controller generates reference heading as output. The described methodology is applied to autonomous catamaran Charlie and the experimental results are presented in the paper. It has been demonstrated that IS-O method gives good results in field conditions and that it is time conservative. All algorithms and results presented here are a result of joint work of researchers at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Genova and the University of Zagreb.