Experimental Study on Automatic Control for Collision Avoidance of Ships

摘要

Automatic control system is widely applied to control ship direction or heading angle following decided trajectory. Many method to improve performance of control system have been developed such as PID control and fuzzy logic based control. Within the last decade, application of automatic control system is not only for ship navigation but also for avoiding collision risk of ships in seaways. This paper discusses regarding application of automatic control system for avoiding ship collision by free running experiment. Fuzzy logic based control was developed refer to Mamdani Centroid method to estimate the necessary rudder angle in order to change the ship heading angle. Collision scenario was designed by using fourfixed obstacles with a certain distance which will be avoided by ship model. The results of free running experiment show that the automatic control system may improve ship safety against collision as least to provide initial warning for ship master. In order to improve performance of control, external disturbance such as wind and wave should be considered in the design of automatic control system.