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