Tests of automated ship handling system for autonomous ship

Abstract

Safety is an important issue in development and operation of autonomous ships, especially unmanned ones. This paper performs verification of the automatic ship control system under the assumption of sensor failure. The authors have developed the automatic control system for an experimental ship Shinpo in previous research. Control functions implemented in the automatic control system rely on several sensors to acquire data of ship’s motion and environment information such as wind. In order to ensure the safety of the autonomous ship's system, it is necessary to verify the behavior of the system and to take measures against failure of sensors. In the present study, redundancy in the case of sensor failure was investigated for automatic berthing control, and then experiments using alternative sensors in the case of sensor failure is conducted using the experimental ship and the results are presented.