Autonomous Docking and Navigation of ships using Model Predictive Control

Abstract: Autonomous shipping is a coming field, where it will be important tooperate a ship without manual intervention. Although there are manyissues yet to be solved, not the least the legal ones, it would be interestingto investigate functions that already now would be possibleto use in today’s ship operation. One such field is autonomous navigationin narrow areas. The purpose of this study is to implement amotion control system to navigate marine vessel autonomously, and aGuidance, Navigation and Control system (GNC) is implemented fordocking and navigating vessels. Voronoi diagram is used for generatinga waypoint list for waypoint tracking. MPC with integral actionis applied to control the vessel for reducing model mismatches andconstant disturbance from current and wind. We performed the GNCsystem for South Harbour of Helsinki, and shown that the vessel isnavigated and docked at port. Moreover, we studied the effects of disturbanceto keep the controller stabilized and suggested an upper limitfor the disturbance.