Path Following of Underactuated Marine Surface Vessels in the Presence of Unknown Ocean Currents

Abstract

This paper considers path following control of snake robots and has two contributions. The first contribution is a description of how a straight line path following controller previously proposed by the authors can be extended to path following of general curved paths. The second contribution of this paper is a waypoint guidance strategy for steering a snake robot along a path defined by waypoints interconnected by straight lines. The waypoint guidance strategy builds on the straight line path following controller previously proposed by the authors. The paper presents simulation results that illustrate the performance of the proposed guidance strategy.