Guidance of laboratory marine platforms

Marine robotics is an interesting area for control engineers since these systems are complex, nonlinear and operate in highly unpredictable environment (winds, currents, waves). This paper present a laboratory model of a surface platform for dynamic positioning which has been developed at the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies, University of Zagreb. The full mathematical model consisting of actuator allocation, dynamic model and kinematic model is described. The platform has primarily been developed for testing and comparison of different control, guidance and navigation algorithms. The platform is overactuated which makes it suitable for fault tolerant control design. The paper describes the procedure of model based line following controller design which ensures stability and zero error line following under the influence of external disturbances.