Comparison of station keeping strategies for long endurance autonomous surface vehicle

Abstract

This paper presents energy-efficient guidance strategies of autonomous surface vehicles for a long endurance mission where station keeping (also known as dynamic positioning) is required to keep the vehicle at a fixed point or within the specified area. A small size vehicle with two thrusters is considered, which is underactuated and can be greatly affected by environmental effects such as wind, wave, and currents. Several station keeping algorithms are proposed including the vector field approach and the variation of conventional dynamic positioning approaches. Their performance in terms of fuel consumption is compared by numerical simulations with both ideal and realistic environmental conditions.