In order to damp the heave motion of surface effect ships(SESs),a sliding mode controller with a disturbance observer was designed.At first,a disturbance observer was proposed to estimate the unknown time-varying disturbance acting on SESs due to waves.Then,based on the disturbance,a slide mode controller was designed to minimize the magnitude of SES's heave motion position.It was theoretically proved that the designed sliding mode controller with the disturbance observer could guarantee the stability of the closed-loop heave motion control system of SESs.Simulations on a Norwegian Navy's SES were carried out and the simulation results illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed controller with the disturbance observer.
A vision-based scheme for object recognition and transport with a mobile robot is proposed in this paper. First, camera calibration is experimentally performed with Zhenyou Zhang's method, and a distance measurement method with the monocular camera is presented and tested. Second, Kalman filtering algorithm is used to predict the movement of a target with HSI model as the input and the seed filling algorithm as the image segmentation approach. Finally, the motion control of the pan-tilt camera and mobile robot is designed to fulfill the tracking and transport task. The experiment results demonstrate the robust object recognition and fast tracking capabilities of the proposed scheme.