Simulation of the Guidance and Control Systems for Underactuated Vessels

Intelligent and/or autonomous vehicle technologies are rapidly growing to meet the needs of marine safety and transport efficiency. One of the requirements to manage autonomous vehicles includes the integration between route planning and automatic motion control. In the authors’ opinion, the latter could be sketched in three different layers: obstacle detection, planning and actuation. Moreover, the three layers should be able to interact in real-time. Dealing with such a challenging task, one of the best techniques to develop and test the logic is the use of the time-domain simulation. In the present work, a simulation model, integrating a path planning algorithm in the presence of obstacles with a track keeping controller, is developed. The path planning is based on a modified version of the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT*) algorithm. The track keeping is based on the Line-of-Sight (LOS) waypoints navigation for underactuated vessels. To achieve more reliable results, a detailed ship simulation model is used as a benchmark. Different scenarios and navigation modes are successfully tested, and the results are presented and analysed.