Jacobian Task Priority-based Approach for Path Following of Unmanned Surface Vehicles

As marine robotics becomes more and more effective and useful for many real applications, control techniques too must be gradually enhanced in order to answer to the arising need of full autonomy for such vehicles. Hence more advanced control algorithms are currently under-development in the marine robotics community in order to accomplish many tasks with more robustness and reliability. In particular, the present work addresses the path following problem, applying the control paradigm of prioritized tasks, usually exploited for robotic manipulators. Such a technique, besides allowing to keep separate the different tasks, thus getting an “emergent behavior” for the vehicle, also provides the ability to easily add further control tasks without changing the architecture. In the present paper the case of two simple tasks allowing the completion of a path following mission, as well as the vehicle velocity regulation, is dealt with and some simulative results are described.