Assessing path-following performance for unmanned marine vehicles with algorithms from numerical commutative algebra

A current trend in marine robotics consists of\r\nperformance evaluation of Unmanned Marine Vehicles (UMVs)\r\nguidance systems. This paper contributes to this by defining\r\nand testing performance indices and metrics to quantitatively\r\nmeasure and compare path-following performance. It focuses on\r\nthe definition of a new criterion for evaluating the capability\r\nof an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) to follow a desired\r\ngeneric curvilinear path. The main advantages of the method\r\nare represented by the possibility to compute the proposed index\r\nonline and in a very general situation. Theoretical bases of the\r\npresented approach and preliminary results on simulated data\r\nthat highlight the versatility of this criterion are presented.