Controller design for unmanned surface vessels through pure prolongations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17979/ja-cea.2026.47.13816Keywords:
Non-Linear Control Systems, Autonomous marine systems and vehicles, Structural and geometric control, Application of nonlinear analysis and design, Trajectory and path planning for AVsAbstract
This paper studies the differential flatness of the six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) model of an Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV), for which no definitive result has previously been established due to complex hydrodynamic couplings. We prove that
the general USV model is differentially flat by decomposing it into a four-degree-of-freedom subsystem, referred to as the core system, which is flat by pure prolongation, together with an endogenous dynamic extension. This result follows from a systematic application of a recently developed algorithm implemented by the authors in Matlab.
The full model inherits the flat outputs of the core system independently of the specific values of the hydrodynamic parameters.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Jaume Franch, Jean Lévine, Jaume Roca
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