Development of autonomous surface vehicles for floating garbage-collection support

This paper presents the development and verification of an Autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) designed to support floating garbage collection. The primary contribution of this research is the implementation and testing of a real-time GPS path-tracking algorithm for longitudinal and lateral control of the ASV, rather than path generation. The focus is on ensuring robust path tracking performance under various environmental conditions. Multiple paths were utilized to ensure efficient water-surface cleaning while maintaining the robustness of the GPS path-tracking algorithm. Low-cost GPS, IMU, and actuators equipped with controllers were used to implement the proposed algorithm on the ASV. A finely tuned PID control algorithm was applied to the ASV and verified in the natural underwater environment at the National Korea Maritime and Ocean University. The performance of the proposed algorithm was verified through ASV tests, demonstrating improved longitudinal and lateral control performance compared to algorithms without multi-path applications and proving useful for garbage collection under various weather conditions. Graphical abstract