Guidance of a small-scale overactuated marine platform - Experimental results

This paper presents the continuation of a project first presented at MIPRO'10 conference. The project includes a small-scale marine platform (PlaDyPos) developed at the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies (LABUST), University of Zagreb which is used for testing control and guidance algorithms for marine vehicles. The paper focuses on the analysis of experimental results obtained on a real overactuated platform. The experiments have exhibited satisfactory behaviour. The proposed guidance algorithm consists of a line following controller decoupled from heading control, enabling motion in arbitrary directions while keeping a predefined orientation. The greatest contribution of the paper is in providing the proof-of-concept of the proposed guidance algorithms. Other experiments performed on the laboratory platform are available online. The following steps of research include collaborative behaviour between the platform and human divers.