Cooperative control of autonomous tugs for ship towing

Autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) are seeing a significant development over the last decade. In recent years, their commercial applications are attracting the attention of many companies. One of the promising subjects is to develop autonomous tugs for ship berthing. This paper focuses on the cooperative control of autonomous tugs for ship...

Multi-vessel cooperative speed regulation for ship manipulation in towing scenarios

This paper proposes a multi-agent control scheme for multiple physically interconnected tugboats performing a ship towing process. These tugs are coordinated by two control layers. In the higher layer, the supervisory controller outputs the desired towing forces and reference trajectories for the tugs. This information is used by a tug's...

Cooperative multi-agent control for autonomous ship towing under environmental disturbances

Among the promising application of autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) is the utilization of multiple autonomous tugs for manipulating a floating object such as an oil platform, a broken ship, or a ship in port areas. Considering the real conditions and operations of maritime practice, this paper proposes a multi-agent control algorithm to...

COLREGS-Compliant collision avoidance for physically coupled multi-vessel systems with distributed MPC

This paper proposes a distributed control scheme for autonomous tugboats to tow a ship in a restricted water traffic environment ensuring collision avoidance while being compliant with maritime regulation called COLREGS. The complex problem is cooperatively solved by addressing three sub-optimization problems. The first is to optimize the...