Path following guidance control with bounded control effort: Application to the Charlie unmanned surface vehicle

This paper addresses the problem of motion control in two-dimensional space for under-actuated unmanned surface vehicles. A guidance motion control law that guarantees bounded velocity commands is derived at the kinematics level. The main difference with respect to the other approaches known in the literature is to be found in the definition of the error variables to be driven to zero. Besides a brief explanation of the proposed approach to solve the guidance problem for under-actuated systems, numerical and experimental results carried out with the Charlie USV are reported.