Quasi-LPV modeling and identification for a water-jet propulsion USV: An experimental study

For an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) system, it is difficult to obtain a precise system model. This is mainly because the USV system is, (1) of extensively complicated and thus presents huge nonlinearities, and (2) easily to be influenced by extensive hydrodynamics. In this paper, our main motivation is to construct a quasi-Linear Parameter Varying (qLPV) dynamical model for a water-jet propulsion USV. The main content of this paper includes two steps: first, theoretical deduction of the qLPV model structure of the USV system is given in detailed including the hydrodynamics; after that, experiments are conducted and the parameter identification results are analyzed to show the priority of the qLPV model compared to some other often referred to models.