Basic navigation, guidance and control of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle

This paper discusses the navigation, guidance and
control (NGC) system of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle
(USV) through extended at sea trials carried out with the
prototype autonomous catamaran Charlie. In particular, experiments
demonstrate the effectiveness, both for precision
and power consumption, of extended Kalman filter and simple
PID guidance and control laws to perform basic control
tasks such as auto-heading, auto-speed and straight line following
with a USV equipped only with GPS and compass