Hardware design and UKF-based tracking control design of Unmanned Trimaran Surface Vehicle

This paper focuses on the process of hardware selection in the design of an Unmanned Trimaran Surface Vehicle (UTSV) and a control scheme design of model-scaled UTSV. The controller development is based on Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) and backstepping techniques. The UKF is used to update the estimation of the uncertain parameters online to avoid the parameters´ drift due to disturbances induced by wave, wind and ocean-current. Along the way of tracking control, we obtain a new stability result for nonlinear underactuated systems with non-vanishing uncertainties. Simulations conducted with respect to the tracking control of unmanned ship illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed controller.