Parallel Dynamic Control of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships for Automatic Berthing

Unlike the traditional automatic berthing methods being, which lack two-way data flow transmission, this paper investigates the problem of parallel control of fully-actuated maritime autonomous surface ships (MASSs) through virtual-real interaction. By combining artificial MASS system, computational experiments, and parallel execution, a parallel dynamic control method is developed to realize state synchronization mapping between virtual MASS system and actual MASS system. Specifically, an extended state observer is proposed to constructed an artificial MASS system, which characterizes the dynamics of actual MASS systems in real-time. Next, in the computational experiments, based on the reference orientation generated by the dipolar guiding vector field and the unknown total disturbance learned by the artificial MASS system, a parallel dynamic control law is designed to guide MASS to achieve the berthing task in a smooth manner. Finally, a parallel dynamic control law drives the actual MASS system to approach the artificial MASS system in a parallel execution, effectively coordinating the state between the virtual and actual systems. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the designed parallel dynamic control scheme for MASS.