Verification of Catamaran-type USV Control System by Sea Experiment– Station Keeping and Move to Target Point –

The possible missions of the autonomous navigation robot ship include collecting marine plastic waste in harbors or coral reef waters, mother ships for underwater equipment such as underwater robots, unmanned ocean observation platforms, maintenance of marine structures such as offshore wind power facilities, automatic feeding systems for smart aquaculture, etc. These cannot be said to have a large commercial economic scale at present, and it is necessary to develop unmanned technology that can be operated at low cost. In order to establish autonomous navigation performance technology, it is necessary to accumulate knowledge through actual sea trials. The authors have been developing a small catamaran-type USV(Unmanned Surface Vehicle) with the aim of constructing a system that allows repeated real-sea experiments relatively easily. In this paper, we report the results of actual sea experiments conducted to confirm the control performance of keeping a fixed point and of moving to a target point, and we discuss some issues that have been found through the experiments.