Tacking Reduces Bow-diving of High-Speed Unmanned Sea Surface Vehicles

We identify tacking as important ingredient to avoid bow-diving of Unmanned Sea Surface Vehicles. We first bootstrap control templates by an evolutionary algorithm. The evolved controller display a distinct tack behavior. We then implement tacking in a control architecture comprising a PID controller for target reaching combined with a high-level planner for tack generation that is based on the concept of point of sail. We evaluate the proposed controller in simulation using a model for severe and littoral sea conditions.