An Interval Approach for Stability Analysis: Application to Sailboat Robotics

Abstract

This paper proposes an interval-based method for the validation of reliable and robust navigation rules for mobile robots. The main idea is to show that for all feasible perturbations, there exists a safe subset of the state space such that the system cannot escape. The methodology is illustrated on the line-following problem of a sailboat and then validated on an actual experiment where an actual sailboat robot, which is named Vaimos, sails autonomously from Brest to Douarnenez (i.e., more than 100 km).