Guidance and Control of Unmanned Surface Vehicles via HEOL

This work presents a new approach to the guidance and control of marine craft via HEOL, i.e., a new way of combining flatness-based and model-free controllers. Its goal is to develop a general regulator for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV). To do so, the well-known USV maneuvering model is simplified into a nominal Hovercraft model which is flat. A flatness-based controller is derived for the simplified USV model and the loop is closed via an intelligent proportional-derivative (iPD) regulator. We thus associate the well-documented natural robustness of flatness-based control and adaptivity of iPDs. The controller is applied in simulation to two surface vessels, one meeting the simplifying hypotheses, the other one being a generic USV of the literature. It is shown to stabilize both systems even in the presence of unmodeled environmental disturbances.

@article{degorre2025_2505.00168,
  title={ Guidance and Control of Unmanned Surface Vehicles via HEOL },
  author={ Loïck Degorre and Emmanuel Delaleau and Cédric Join and Michel Fliess },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.00168},
  year={ 2025 }
}