Development of model predictive guidance for underactuated marine vehicles: From simulations to experiments

A modular open source real-time simulation environment for linear model predictive control (LMPC) of line following at a constant depth is developed for underactuated marine vehicles. Two-stage tuning method of MPC's parameters is implemented as an extension of this simulator. MPC is used for high level control, i.e. setting the yaw rate reference, which is then tracked by the low level PID controllers. Simulation and experimental results show good performance of our MPC-PID control scheme when compared to ordinary PID controllers using Lyapunov-based guidance law.