A Navigation and Control Platform for Real-Time Manoeuvring of Autonomous Ship Models L. P. Perera *, L. Moreira*, F. P. Santos*, V. Ferrari*, S. Sutulo* and C. Guedes Soares * *Centre for Marine Technology and Engineering (CENTEC), Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon, Av, Rovisco Pais, 1049-001, Lisbon, Portugal; e-mail: {prasad.perera, lucia, fernando.santos, victor.ferrari, sutulo, guedess}@mar.ist.utl.pt Abstract: The development of a control and navigation platform for an autonomous surface vessel (ASV) being a scaled self-propelled model of a real ship is presented in this paper. The overall system is described under the hardware structure and the software architecture. The system hardware structure is further divided into the command and monitoring unit (CMU) and the communication and control unit (CCU). The ashore based CMU is used to control the ASV through a wireless Ethernet communication; the ASV mainly consists of the on-board CCU. The system software architecture mainly consists of several software loops for collecting the sensor data and controlling the rudder and propeller actuations. Furthermore, a touch panel as the human machine interface (HMI) is used for autonomous and manual control of the ASV has been implemented. Finally, the future experimental implementations of the ASV are discussed in this paper. Keywords: Autonomous surface vessel, self-propelled model, real-time navigation platform, vessel manoeuvring, intelligent guidance and marine robotics. 1 INTRODUCTION Due to substantial progress in computer technologies and control engineering, autonomous and remotely controlled vehicles are becoming more common. In general, such vehicles can be subdivided into remotely controlled and autonomous although the latter often can also be controlled remotely by a human operator. These vehicles are designed for different missions like search and rescue, mine hunting operations, harbour and shoreline surveillance, reconnaissance, environmental monitoring, among others. The present contribution is, however, dealing with a special application of an autonomous surface vessel (ASV), which aims at performing a series of manoeuvring tests in an autonomous way. The knowledge of the manoeuvring characteristics of a ship allows time simulations of its path as a function of its control settings (Sutulo et al., 2002). However, at the present stage of development of ship hydrodynamics, creation of adequate mathematical models for ship manoeuvring simulation is still impossible without recourse to experimental data although lately Computational Fluid Dynamics started to represent a certain alternative. The strict requirements that have been imposed by IMO (1993,1994, 2002), which require all ships to have results of their manoeuvring tests on board, imply that the need to perform manoeuvring tests will increase in the future and thus efficient and cost effective ways of doing them are required. Full-scale trials with ships (e.g. Guedes Soares et al., 1999, 2004) are done as confirmation of the existing capabilities or they can be done for ships that do not have the required model test results. Most of the experimental studies aim at the determination of hydrodynamic forces and moments after captive-model tests which can be effectively performed on two kinds of experimental facilities: circulating tanks and planar-motion mechanisms (Brix 1993). The latter have finally evolved into Computerized Planar Motion Carriages (CPMC). Both kinds of facilities are expensive and there are relatively few in the world. An alternative is to test remote controlled scaled models equipped with appropriate rudders and propulsion plants (Luo and Zhang, 2007, Philips et al., 2009, Moreira, and Guedes Soares, 2011). These experiments are cheaper and can provide results of quality when carried out in appropriate calm basins. In order to be useful, such models for self-running tests must be appropriately instrumented to provide high-quality records of kinematic parameters measured during special test manoeuvres. The thus recorded data can be used for system identification procedures. A review on the application of identification methods to ship manoeuvring can be found in (Sutulo and Guedes Soares, 2011). Although in principle all manoeuvres can be remote controlled manually, this is highly inconvenient in certain cases, like the zigzag manoeuvre which is especially important for identification purposes. Hence, a good self-running model for manoeuvring tests must be able to manoeuvre in autonomous mode and this was the motivation for the present work. This paper describes such a model (called here ASV) with focus on the instrumentation including the control and navigation equipment installed on the model. 9th IFAC Conference on Manoeuvring and Control of Marine Craft, 2012 The International Federation of Automatic Control September 19-21, 2012. Arenzano, Italy ©2012 IFAC 10.3182/20120919-3-IT-2046.00079 465