From Manoeuvre Assistance to Manoeuvre Automation

Abstract One of the greatest challenges in shipping automation is the automatic manoeuvring in areas with high safety standards which are executed today exclusively by nautical officers with appropriate expertise. Precise manoeuvre plans and suitable control solutions are missing because the human operators act according their mental strategies. The presented approach for automated manoeuvring primarily bases on a complex dynamic motion model of a specific vessel. This model is adapted and used to plan a complete manoeuvre sequence considering the common nautical guidelines and the vessel characteristics. The resulting digital manoeuvre plan forms the basis for the assistance during manual manoeuvring as well as the automatic manoeuvring. Prognosticated weather conditions can be involved already during the planning. For automatic manoeuvring, the deduced manoeuvre trajectory is implemented into the feed-forward part of velocity control. The entire control structure is cascaded in outer trajectory controller and inner velocity controller. The described approach was successfully applied for large vessels in ship handling simulator for automatic collision avoidance and port manoeuvres.