The Collaborative Autonomous Shipping Experiment (CASE): Motivations, Theory, Infrastructure, and Experimental Challenges

Abstract

The future autonomous ships will be operating in an environment where different autonomous and nonautonomous vessels with different characteristics exist. These vessels are owned by different parties and each uses its owned unique approaches for guidance and navigation. The Collaborative Autonomous Shipping Experiment(CASE) aims at emulating such an environment and also stimulating the move of automatic ship control algorithms towards practice by bringing together different institutes researching on autonomous vessels under an umbrella to experiment with collective sailing in inland waterways. In this paper, the experiments of CASE 2020 are explained, the characteristics of different participating vessels are discussed and some of the control and perception algorithms that are planned to be used at CASE 2020 are presented. CASE 2020 will be held in parallel to iSCSS 2020 at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.

Dynamic target chasing: parameters and performance indicators assessment

“…The implemented laws have been tested through a simulation campaign with various manoeuvres. Indeed, the testing phase has been based on a properly developed simulation platform that reproduces the dynamic behaviour of the model-scale tugboat named "Tito Neri", fully validated and presented in [28]. Indeed, thanks to a simulation platform, it is possible to simulate the dynamic system behaviour, as demonstrated in [29].…”