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As the development of multidisciplinary techniques and ever-growing demands, autonomous system has been widely investigated in a variety of fields. In recent two decades, autonomous surface vessels have gained increasing attention from both industry and research communities, previous related work mainly focuses on the design of maneuver controllers, most algorithms are under some specific assumptions and always involve too many parameters that need to be tuned, leading to the lack of practical application or validation in real autonomous surface vessel platform. To tackle the issues, an integrated autonomous surface vessel prototype is designed and implemented, both navigation and maneuver control subsystems are improved, especially in terms of autonomous control, a simple geometrical model and constrained pure pursuit algorithm is firstly tried in autonomous surface vessel, the results show that the proposed system can achieve the path tracking with the error smaller than 40 cm, and even given a complicated waypoint mission, it can still maintain the accuracy of path tracking, demonstrating the stability and validity of the autonomous surface vessel prototype.

As the growing demands and the rising of advanced sensor technologies, autonomous systems in a variety of applications including aerospace, surface and underwater vehicles have gained tremendous attention both in industry and research communities. Particularly, in recent two decades, there is incremental work in autonomous surface vessel domain, mainly focusing on the design of maneuver controller. Typically, the proposed controllers are non-linear and involve several parameters need to be carefully tuned, as a consequence, few of the proposed algorithms have been validated in a practical platform. In this paper, an autonomous surface vessel prototype is firstly implemented, based on the practical platform and inspired by the control design in field of autonomous ground vehicle (AGV), a simplified bicycle model is proposed and accordingly an angle-constrained pure pursuit algorithm is tried in ASV, from the linear course and way-point experiments results, it is verified that the proposed model and control algorithm is effective in the ASV with the accuracy up to 40 cm approximately.