• 산업경영시스템학회지
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• 제46권4호
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• pp.238-245
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• 2023

As technologies have been more quickly developed in this 4th Industry Revolution era, their application to defense industry has been also growing. With these much advanced technologies, we attempt to use Manned-Unmanned Teaming systems in various military operations. In this study, we consider the Location-Routing Problem for reconnaissance surveillance missions of the maritime manned-unmanned surface vehicles. As a solution technique, the two-phase method is presented. In the first location phase, the p-median problem is solved to determine which nodes are used as the seeds for the manned vehicles using Lagrangian relaxation with the subgradient method. In the second routing phase, using the results obtained from the location phase, the Vehicle Routing Problems are solved to determine the search routes of the unmanned vehicles by applying the Location Based Heuristic. For three network data sets, computational experiments are conducted to show the performance of the proposed two-phase method.

• 한국해양공학회지
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• 제26권3호
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• pp.6-12
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• 2012

In this paper, addressed is the control problem of generating a formation for a group of unmanned surface and underwater vehicles. The formation control scheme proposed in this work is based on a fusion of theleader-follower and virtual reference approaches. This scheme gives a formation constraint representation that is independent of the number of vehicles in the formation and the resulting control algorithm is scalable. One of the most important features in controller design is the ability of the controller to globally and exponentially stabilize the formation errors defined by the formation constraints. The proposed controller is based on feedback linearization, and the formation errors are shown to be globally and exponentially stable in the sense of Lyapunov.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• 제39권2호
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• pp.159-165
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• 2015

Motion control schemes are generally classified into three categories (point stabilization, trajectory tracking, and path following). This paper deals with the problem which is associated with the initial deployment of a group of Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USVs) and corresponding point stabilization. To keep the formation of a group of USVs, it is necessary to set the relationship between each vehicle. A forcing functions such as potential fields are designed to keep the formation and a graph Laplacian is used to represent the connectivity between vehicle. In case of fixed topology of the graph representing the communication between the vehicles, the graph Laplacian is assumed constant. However the graph topologies are allowed to change as the vehicles move, and the system dynamics become discontinuous in nature because the graph Laplacian changes as time passes. To check the stability in the stage of deployment, the system is modeled with Kronecker algebra notation. Filippov's calculus of differential equations with discontinuous right hand sides is then used to formally characterize the behavior of USVs. The stability of the system is analyzed with Lyapunov's stability theory and LaSalle's invariance principle, and the validity is shown by checking the variation of state norm.

• 대한조선학회논문집
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• 제61권3호
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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.

• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
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• 제7권1호
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• pp.87-99
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• 2015

In recent years, the development of autonomous surface vehicles has been a field of increasing research interest. There are two major areas in this field: control theory and path planning. This study focuses on path planning, and two objectives are discussed: path planning for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) and implementation of path planning in a real map. In this paper, satellite thermal images are converted into binary images which are used as the maps for the Finite Angle $A^*$ algorithm ($FAA^*$), an advanced $A^*$ algorithm that is used to determine safer and suboptimal paths for USVs. To plan a collision-free path, the algorithm proposed in this article considers the dimensions of surface vehicles. Furthermore, the turning ability of a surface vehicle is also considered, and a constraint condition is introduced to improve the quality of the path planning algorithm, which makes the traveled path smoother. This study also shows a path planning experiment performed on a real satellite thermal image, and the path planning results can be used by an USV.

• 한국해양공학회지
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• 제33권6호
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• pp.620-626
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• 2019

With the development of robot technology, the expectation of autonomous mission operations has increased, and the research on robot control architectures and mission planners has continued. A scalable and robust control architecture is required for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) to perform a variety of tasks, such as surveillance, reconnaissance, and search and rescue operations, in unstructured and time-varying maritime environments. In this paper, we propose a robot control architecture along with a new utility function that can be extended to various applications for USVs. Also, an additional structure is proposed to reflect the operator's command and improve the performance of the autonomous mission. The proposed architecture was developed using a robot operating system (ROS), and the performance and feasibility of the architecture were verified through simulations.

• 한국정보전자통신기술학회논문지
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• 제12권4호
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• pp.425-433
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• 2019

본 논문에서는 10m급 무인수상정의 RCS 해석과 함께 RCS 증가 요인을 분석하고 RCS 감소 방안을 도출하였다. 기하학적 형상을 변형시키는 성형기법을 통해 레이다 단면적을 감소시킬 수 있고, 이것을 스텔스 무인수상정 개발에 활용할 수 있음을 확인한다. RCS 감소를 위해 기존의 Top Mast 부분을 함미부분으로 1m 이동시키고 경사각 5도를 준 후 0.5 m 아래로 이동시킨 다음 중앙과 주변 반사 구조물에 대한 영향을 최소화시키기 위해 주변에 Guided Wall을 추가 설치하였다. 기존 모델과의 RCS 해석 값을 비교 분석한 결과 모든 고각에 대해 감소 대책이 적용된 모델이 기존 모델보다 -3.79 dB 이상 낮아진 것을 알 수 있으며, 최대 대푯값은 기존 모델 고각 0도의 12.74 dB에서 6.32 dB로 낮아졌다. 특히, 희생각 영역을 제외한 영역에서 강한 산란 현상이 상당부분 제거된 것을 확인할 수 있다. 또한, Guide wall을 추가한 -5m ~ 2 m 부분의 경우 반사되는 신호가 최대 20 ~ 40 dB 이상 개선되어 2D ISAR 영상에 나타나지 않는 것을 알 수 있다. 무인수상정 RCS 분석은 거리방향 프로파일 분석과 ISAR 영상 분석을 통해 문제 위치를 분석, 식별하는 과정을 설명하였으며, 그에 대한 문제를 해결할 수 있는 RCS 감소 방안을 함께 제시하였다.

• 한국해양공학회지
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• 제30권5호
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• pp.426-430
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• 2016

Recently, many unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) have been developed and researched for various fields such as the military, environment, and robotics. In order to perform purpose specific tasks, common autonomous navigation technologies are needed. Obstacle avoidance is important for safe autonomous navigation. This paper describes a vector field histogram+ (VFH+) based obstacle avoidance method that uses the monocular vision of an unmanned surface vehicle. After creating a polar histogram using VFH+, an open space without the histogram is selected in the moving direction. Instead of distance sensor data, monocular vision data are used for make the polar histogram, which includes obstacle information. An object on the water is recognized as an obstacle because this method is for USV. The results of a simulation with sea images showed that we can verify a change in the moving direction according to the position of objects.

• 한국군사과학기술학회지
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• 제7권3호
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• pp.59-68
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• 2004

Unmanned surface vehicles(USVs) have been developed for special operations in foreign navies. These will be employed to conduct critical missions including inspection, coast guard, ISR, fire protection, precision strike, mine interception warfare and antisubmarine warfare. It is also known the USVs will be deployed at the front line of the network-centric warfare to replace the manned naval operations. The unmanned operation can, thus, minimize unnecessary risk to personnel and enhance the success probability for the imposed mission. In this research, the USVs which are under operation and development in foreign navies are investigated. Based on this, an USV with $7\~10m$ of length and 10ton of weight for the Korean Navy which can be deployed near the Northern Limit Line(NLL), is proposed.

• Advances in robotics research
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• 제2권2호
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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.