• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
• /
• v.46 no.4
• /
• pp.238-245
• /
• 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.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.26 no.3
• /
• pp.6-12
• /
• 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
• /
• v.39 no.2
• /
• pp.159-165
• /
• 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.

• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
• /
• v.61 no.3
• /
• pp.170-184
• /
• 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
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.87-99
• /
• 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.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.33 no.6
• /
• pp.620-626
• /
• 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.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.425-433
• /
• 2019

In this paper, the RCS analysis of the 10m unmanned surface vehicles was performed, and the factors of RCS increase were analyzed. Modeling techniques by transforming a geometric shape can reduce the RCS area, which can be used to develop stealth unmanned surface vehicles. In order to reduce the RCS, the existing Top Mast part was moved 1m to the tail part, the 5 degree tilt angle was moved below 0.5 m, and additional guided walls were installed to minimize the influence on the center and surrounding corner reflecting structures. As a result of comparing and analyzing the RCS analysis value with the existing model, it can be seen that the reduced countermeasure model is -3.79 dB lower than the existing model for all elevations. In particular, it can be seen that the strong scattering phenomenon is substantially removed in the region except the sacrificial angle region. In addition, it can be seen that in the case of -5m to 2m where the guide wall is added, the reflected signal is improved up to 20 to 40 dB or more, so that it does not appear on the 2D ISAR image. RCS analysis of unmanned surface vehicles explained the process of analyzing and identifying problem location through distance profile analysis and ISAR image analysis.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.30 no.5
• /
• pp.426-430
• /
• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
• /
• v.7 no.3 s.18
• /
• pp.59-68
• /
• 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
• /
• v.2 no.2
• /
• pp.161-182
• /
• 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.