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Du, Zhe (author), Negenborn, R.R. (author), Reppa, V. (author)The regulatory endorsement of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the support of pivotal shipping market players in recent years motivate the investigation of the potential role that autonomous vessels play in the shipping industry. As the complexity and scale of the envisioned applications increase, research works gradually...review 2023
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Du, Zhe (author), Negenborn, R.R. (author), Reppa, V. (author)Transportation of a large offshore platform from inland waters to the open sea is a hazardous and challenging mission. With the development of the autonomous surface vessel (ASV), the problem of large floating object transportation has a chance to be solved by applying multiple physical-connected autonomous tugboats. This article proposes a...journal article 2023
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Flexible Collision-free Platooning Method for Unmanned Surface Vehicle with Experimental ValidationsDu, B. (author), Lin, Bin (author), Xie, Wei (author), Zhang, Weidong (author), Negenborn, R.R. (author), Pang, Y. (author)This paper addresses the flexible formation problem for unmanned surface vehicles in the presence of obstacles. Building upon the leader-follower formation scheme, a hybrid line-of-sight based flexible platooning method is proposed for follower vehicle to keep tracking the leader ship. A fusion artificial potential field collision avoidance...conference paper 2022
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Multi-Objective Cooperative Control for a Ship-Towing System in Congested Water Traffic EnvironmentsDu, Zhe (author), Negenborn, R.R. (author), Reppa, V. (author)This paper proposes a multi-objective cooperative control method for a ship-towing system in congested water traffic environments. The control objectives are to coordinate multiple autonomous tugboats for transporting a ship to: (i) follow the waypoints, (ii) adjust the heading, (iii) track the speed profile, and (iv) resolve collisions. The...journal article 2022
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Du, Zhe (author), Negenborn, R.R. (author), Reppa, V. (author)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...journal article 2022
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Du, Zhe (author), Negenborn, R.R. (author), Reppa, V. (author)This paper proposes a novel dynamic coordination control scheme for a physically connected multi-vessel towing system to transport an offshore platform. The transportation process is executed by four tugboats, and each of them has a leading or following role. To render the transportation faster, the roles of the tugboats can be switched in...conference paper 2022
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Du, Zhe (author), Negenborn, R.R. (author), Reppa, V. (author)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...journal article 2021
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Du, Zhe (author), Negenborn, R.R. (author), Reppa, V. (author)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...journal article 2021
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Du, Zhe (author), Reppa, V. (author), Negenborn, R.R. (author)Collision avoidance plays a vital role in autonomous vehicle systems. As the complexity and scale of missions increase, multi-vehicle systems are adopted in practice. However, there is limited research on collision avoidance of a physically interconnected multi-vessel system. This paper proposes a control scheme for tugboats to tow a ship in...conference paper 2021
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Du, Zhe (author), Reppa, V. (author), Negenborn, R.R. (author)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...journal article 2020