Investigation on a Novel Support System for Automatic Ship Berthing in Marine Practice

Abstract

For safe ship berthing, all steps involved, from bringing the ship to the fairway area to directing it to the final wharf position at a desirable speed, need to be performed properly. In this article, a support system is proposed to automatically bring the ship into the berth after completing the maneuvering process. This proposed system requires no involvement of a shipmaster, enabling automatic ship berthing in marine practice. Three fuzzy controllers are proposed to conduct different tasks of berthing. The first controller is designed to control the movement of the ship in a longitudinal direction towards the wharf while the second controller stabilizes the relative bearing error with respect to the tugboat. The final controller is responsible for bringing the ship into a wharf according to crabbing motion with bow thruster and tugboat simultaneously. Compared to other approaches, ours has a wider range of adoption, better generalization capability, and is more suitable for marine practice. Comprehensive experiments in numerical simulations are carried out, showing the superior performance of the proposed support system for automatic ship berthing.

Research on Ship Automatic Berthing Algorithm Based on Flow Matching and Velocity Matching

“…Consequently, the necessity for retraining upon a ship's arrival at a new port is mitigated. In 2019, Nguyen [14] proposed a ship automatic berthing support system using fuzzy logic theory. This system employed three fuzzy controllers to accomplish the automatic berthing process, including longitudinal movement, stabilization of relative orientation error, and final dock guidance.…”

“…S all = S acc + S con + S dcc (14) In the AD strategy, constrained by the berthing distance, the vessel's velocity can only accelerate to U acc2 . Therefore, it is necessary to adjust the duration of the acceleration phase, denoted as t 4 , to ensure that both the distances S acc2 and S dcc2 during the acceleration and deceleration phases, respectively, meet the requirement outlined in Equation (15), where ξ represents the predetermined error threshold.…”

Investigation of a Multitasking System for Automatic Ship Berthing in Marine Practice Based on an Integrated Neural Controller

“…However, this system has a drawback, in that the ship's motion in the longitudinal direction is assumed to be zero. On the other hand, Nguyen (2019) and Nguyen and Im [19,20] introduced fuzzy controllers for ship berthing in near areas of the berth. These systems can control the ship into the berth without any conditions, unlike previous studies.…”