• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.61 no.3
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• pp.170-184
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• 2024

With the advancement of autonomous navigation technology in maritime domain, there is an active research on swarming Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) that can fulfill missions with low cost and high efficiency. In this study, we propose a formation control algorithm that maintains a certain shape when multiple unmanned surface vehicles operate in a swarm. In the case of swarming, individual USVs need to be able to accurately follow the target state and avoid collisions with obstacles or other vessels in the swarm. In order to generate guidance commands for swarm formation control, the potential field method has been a major focus of swarm control research, but the method using the potential field only uses the position information of obstacles or other ships, so it cannot effectively respond to moving targets and obstacles. In situations such as the formation change of a swarm of ships, the formation control is performed in a dense environment, so the position and velocity information of the target and nearby obstacles must be considered to effectively change the formation. In order to overcome these limitations, this paper applies a method that considers relative velocity to the potential field-based guidance law to improve target following and collision avoidance performance. Considering the relative velocity of the moving target, the potential field for nearby obstacles is newly defined by utilizing the concept of Velocity Obstacle (VO), and the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method is verified through swarm control simulation, and swarm control experiments using a small scaled unmanned surface vehicle platform.

• Advances in robotics research
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.161-182
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• 2018

This paper proposes a novel receding horizon control (RHC) algorithm for formation control of a swarm of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) using particle swarm optimization (PSO). The proposed control algorithm provides the coordinated path tracking of multi-agent USVs while preventing collisions and considering external disturbances such as ocean currents. A three degrees-of-freedom kinematic model of the USV is used for the RHC with guaranteed stability and convergence by incorporating a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)-based particle initialization. An ocean current model-based estimator is designed to compensate for the effect of ocean currents on the USVs. This method is compared with the PSO-based RHC algorithms to demonstrate the performance of the formation control and the collision avoidance in the presence of ocean currents through numerical simulations.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.1-10
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• 2022

Defense fields widely operate unmanned systems to lower vulnerability and enhance combat effectiveness. In the navy, swarm unmanned surface vehicles(USVs) form a cluster within communication range, share situational awareness information among the USVs, and cooperate with them to conduct military missions. This paper proposes an interface system, i.e., Interface Adapter System(IAS), to achieve inter-USV and intra-USV interoperability. We focus on the mission planning subsystem(MPS) for interoperability, which is the core subsystem of the USV to decide courses of action such as automatic path generation and weapon assignments. The central role of the proposed system is to exchange interface data between MPSs and other subsystems in real-time. To this end, we analyzed the operational requirements of the MPS and identified interface messages. Then we developed the IAS using the distributed real-time middleware. As experiments, we conducted several integration tests at swarm USVs simulation environment and measured delay time and loss ratio of interface messages. We expect that the proposed IAS successfully provides bridge roles between the mission planning system and other subsystems.

• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.475-486
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• 2016

Four-rotor dish-shaped unmanned underwater vehicles (FRDS UUVs) are new type underwater vehicles. The main goal of this paper is to develop a quick method to optimize the design of hydraulic support landing platform for the new UUV. In this paper, the geometry configuration and instability type of the platform are defined. Computational investigations are carried out to study the hydrodynamic performance of the landing platform using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method. Then, the response surface model of the optimization objective is established. The intelligent particle swarm optimization (PSO) is applied to finding the optimal solution. The result demonstrates that the stability of landing platform is significantly improved with the global objective index increasing from 1.045 to 1.158 (10.86% higher) after the optimization process.