Towards the Autonomy: Control Systems for the Ship in Confined and Open Waters

Abstract

The concept of the Marine Autonomous Surface Ship (MASS) requires new solutions in many areas: from law, through economics, social sciences, environmental issues to the technology and even ethics. It also plays a central role in the work of numerous research teams dealing with the ship motion control systems. This article presents the results of the experiments with application of the selected control methods in automatic steering of the movement of an autonomous ship in the two regimes: during the maneuvers at low speed (in a harbor confined waters) and during the lake trials in open water conditions. In the first case, multidimensional state controller synthesized with Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI) algorithms was used, while, in the second case, Model Predictive Control (MPC) control was adopted. The object for which the experiments were carried out was 1:24 scale model of the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) carrier. The paper presents also the design of the measurement and control system and the user interface. The experiments were conducted in the natural conditions on the lake. The results of the experiments indicate the fundamental role of the measurement system in the process of controlling an autonomous ship.

Computationally Efficient Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Using the L1 Cost-Function

“…The trajectory α(e traj (k)), defined by Equation (19), is calculated using the neural approximator from Equation (10). The predicted control errors, e(k + p|k), are computed from Equation (6).…”

“…The work in [ 18 ] presents a real vehicle that uses an external camera to detect obstacles and lanes on the road as well as external rear-corner radars to detect objects coming from the rear. An interesting example is presented in [ 19 ], where an anemometer is used to measure external disturbances such as wind force and direction. In [ 20 ], a depth sensor is installed for sea ship depth measurement.…”

Control of Dynamic Positioning System with Disturbance Observer for Autonomous Marine Surface Vessels

“…The parameters of the reference model (10) were ζ i = 1, ω ni = 0.08, where i = 1, 2, 3. The maximum values in Formulas ( 19) and ( 22) were imposed as limits on the control signal generated by the DP controllers (51).…”

“…Extensive development work is currently underway on the concept of the Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship (MASS), which requires new solutions in many areas: law, economics, guidance, control and navigation [1][2][3]. Automated navigation tasks require the further development of high-level control systems; in particular, with respect to such issues as path planning and collision avoidance [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. However, the basic issue in the research on developing autonomous marine surface vessels is motion control.…”

Pareto Effect of LMI for Ship Propulsion

“…This work will analyze the operation of propulsion and steering devices (Table 1). This paper mainly focuses on the description of H ∞ and H 2 norms, and the multidimensional object used in simulations, the "BLUE LADY" ship model, is described in detail in the papers below [11][12][13][14][15][16]. State-space equations of the closed system are as follows:…”