Research on Ship Autonomous Steering Control for Short-Sea Shipping Problems

Abstract

Today most ship rotation angle (steering control during movement) increase or decrease is done using an operator on deck or the auxiliary system in the ships engine room. Formal regulations suggest using manual inspection of the ship rotation and the work effectiveness of the engine during manoeuvring in ports and in the open sea regions. The accuracy of this procedure is very low and depends on the personnel of the deck. Therefore, automation and computer control systems are constantly required to assist the human eye. This problem becomes clearly visible when dealing with full ship autonomy in the open sea in the short-sea shipping regions. The trend of maritime technology development will only increase in the area of human interaction decrease with the physical operations and the shipping procedures, which will lead to the future full ship autonomy in the open sea regions around the globe. With the growing automation technologies, predictive control can prove to be a better approach than the traditionally applied visual inspection policy and linear control models. Ship full autonomy is also linked to the ship's machinery regular repair and maintenance that has to be carried out for delivering satisfactory performance and minimizing downtime during transportation operations. In this paper, current stages of development of the intelligent transportation system concept are discussed for the ship autonomy in manoeuvring control and a robust ships' systems integration and communication system concept is presented for several normal and abnormal situations: high-traffic, potentially dangerous situations or port approaching or ship maintenance, with the capability to solve problems with the limited human interface and with a remote control possibility. Then, simplified ship steering motor system for the main pump is analysed for rotation control using control voltage from the converters. Retrieved data from a small experimental control motor is used for the predictive control approach using two different methods: a neural network trained with Basic Levenberg-Marquardt Method and a Linear Model.

Autonomous vessels: state of the art and potential opportunities in logistics

“…Jakovlev et al. (2017) illustrated an integrated intellectual data communication network for a short‐sea‐shipping maritime information system which guarantees the adaptability and availability of information for autonomous vessels. Wróbel et al.…”

“…Jakovlev et al (2017) illustrated an integrated intellectual data communication network for a short-sea-shipping maritime information system which guarantees the adaptability and availability of information for autonomous vessels Wróbel et al (2018). applied System-Theoretic Process Analysis to offer valuable recommendations for innovative technical system design of autonomous vessels Jin et al (2018).…”

Feature Extraction from Indirect Monitoring in Marine Oil Separation Systems

“…Usually two kind of maintenance procedures are applied: the preventive one, which is proposed by manufactures of its mechanical, electrical or electronic systems; and the corrective one, which takes place in case of failure. Nowadays, the most useful and efficient technique is predictive maintenance, and in the last years it has being used in many of industries [ 1 , 2 , 3 ], including the maritime industry [ 4 , 5 , 6 ]. This method is based on the fact that any machinery will show a signal before of failing.…”