Mario Pereira Martína

The increasing use and implementation of Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) for various activities in maritime environments is expected to drive a rise in developments and research on their control. Particularly, the coordination of multiple ASVs presents novel challenges and opportunities, requiring interdisciplinary research efforts at the intersection of robotics, control theory, communication systems, and marine sciences. The wide variety of missions or objectives for which these vessels can be collectively used allows for the application and combination of different control techniques. This includes the exploration of machine learning to consider aspects previously deemed infeasible. This review provides a comprehensive exploration of coordinated ASV control while addressing critical gaps left by previous reviews. Unlike previous works, we adopt a systematic approach to ensure integrity and minimize bias in article selection. We delve into the complex world of sub-actuated ASVs with a focus on customized control strategies and the integration of machine learning techniques for increased autonomy. By synthesizing recent advances and identifying emerging trends, we offer insights that drive this field forward, providing both a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art techniques and guidance for future research efforts.

The growth of the global population, together with climate change and water scarcity, has made the shift towards efficient and sustainable agriculture increasingly important. Undoubtedly, the recent development of low-cost IoT-based sensors and actuators offers great opportunities in this direction since these devices can be easily deployed to implement advanced monitoring and irrigation control techniques at a farm scale, saving energy and water and decreasing costs. This paper proposes an economic and periodic predictive controller taking advantage of the irrigation periodicity. The goal of the controller is to find an irrigation technique that optimizes water and energy consumption while ensuring adequate levels of soil moisture for crops, achieving the maximum crop yield. For this purpose, the developed predictive controller makes use of soil moisture data at different depths, and it formulates a constrained optimization problem that considers energy and water costs, crop transpiration, and an accurate dynamical nonlinear model of the water dynamics in the soil, reflecting the reality. This controller strategy is compared with a classical irrigation strategy adopted by a human expert in a specific case study, demonstrating that it is possible to obtain significant reductions in water and energy consumption without compromising crop yields.