In Proceedings of the 9th IFAC Conference on Manoeuvring and Control of Marine Craft (MCMC2012), Arenzano, Italy, September, 2012.

A Navigation and Control Platform for Real-Time Manoeuvring of Autonomous Ship Models
L. P. Perera *, L. Moreira*, F. P. Santos*, V. Ferrari*, S. Sutulo* and C. Guedes Soares * *Centre for Marine Technology and Engineering (CENTEC), Instituto Superior Tcnico, Technical University of Lisbon, Av, Rovisco Pais, 1049-001, Lisbon, Portugal; e-mail: {prasad.perera, lucia, fernando.santos, victor.ferrari, sutulo, guedess}@mar.ist.utl.pt Abstract: The development of a control and navigation platform for an autonomous surface vessel (ASV) being a scaled self-propelled model of a real ship is presented in this paper. The overall system is described under the hardware structure and the software architecture. The system hardware structure is further divided into the command and monitoring unit (CMU) and the communication and control unit (CCU). The ashore based CMU is used to control the ASV through a wireless Ethernet communication; the ASV mainly consists of the on-board CCU. The system software architecture mainly consists of several software loops for collecting the sensor data and controlling the rudder and propeller actuations. Furthermore, a touch panel as the human machine interface (HMI) is used for autonomous and manual control of the ASV has been implemented. Finally, the future experimental implementations of the ASV are discussed in this paper. Keywords: Autonomous surface vessel, self-propelled model, real-time navigation platform, vessel manoeuvring, intelligent guidance and marine robotics. capabilities or they can be done for ships that do not have the required model test results. Most of the experimental studies aim at the determination of hydrodynamic forces and moments after captive-model tests which can be effectively performed on two kinds of experimental facilities: circulating tanks and planar-motion mechanisms (Brix 1993). The latter have finally evolved into Computerized Planar Motion Carriages (CPMC). Both kinds of facilities are expensive and there are relatively few in the world. An alternative is to test remote controlled scaled models equipped with appropriate rudders and propulsion plants (Luo and Zhang, 2007, Philips et al., 2009, Moreira, and Guedes Soares, 2011). These experiments are cheaper and can provide results of quality when carried out in appropriate calm basins. In order to be useful, such models for self-running tests must be appropriately instrumented to provide high-quality records of kinematic parameters measured during special test manoeuvres. The thus recorded data can be used for system identification procedures. A review on the application of identification methods to ship manoeuvring can be found in (Sutulo and Guedes Soares, 2011). Although in principle all manoeuvres can be remote controlled manually, this is highly inconvenient in certain cases, like the zigzag manoeuvre which is especially important for identification purposes. Hence, a good self-running model for manoeuvring tests must be able to manoeuvre in autonomous mode and this was the motivation for the present work. This paper describes such a model (called here ASV) with focus on the instrumentation including the control and navigation equipment installed on the model.

1 INTRODUCTION Due to substantial progress in computer technologies and control engineering, autonomous and remotely controlled vehicles are becoming more common. In general, such vehicles can be subdivided into remotely controlled and autonomous although the latter often can also be controlled remotely by a human operator. These vehicles are designed for different missions like search and rescue, mine hunting operations, harbour and shoreline surveillance, reconnaissance, environmental monitoring, among others. The present contribution is, however, dealing with a special application of an autonomous surface vessel (ASV), which aims at performing a series of manoeuvring tests in an autonomous way. The knowledge of the manoeuvring characteristics of a ship allows time simulations of its path as a function of its control settings (Sutulo et al., 2002). However, at the present stage of development of ship hydrodynamics, creation of adequate mathematical models for ship manoeuvring simulation is still impossible without recourse to experimental data although lately Computational Fluid Dynamics started to represent a certain alternative. The strict requirements that have been imposed by IMO (1993,1994, 2002), which require all ships to have results of their manoeuvring tests on board, imply that the need to perform manoeuvring tests will increase in the future and thus efficient and cost effective ways of doing them are required. Full-scale trials with ships (e.g. Guedes Soares et al., 1999, 2004) are done as confirmation of the existing

2. BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE MODEL The developed ASV represents a scaled self-propelled model of the tanker ship Aurora for which all necessary information including body lines, general arrangement drawings and drawings of the fixed-pitch propeller and rudder were available. As the ASV was aimed at determining the manoeuvring characteristics of the hull, the model was manufactured without superstructures. As all planned tests are supposed to be carried out in still water and good weather conditions, no covering was envisaged although the main sensitive parts were protected by plastic cases against occasional splashes. The developed ASV includes a real-time navigation platform presented in Figure 1, which is developed as a part of an intelligent navigation system (INS) initiated in Moreira et al. (2008) and Moreira and Guedes Soares (2011). The dimensions of the model manufactured in the scale 1:65.7 are given in Table 1. The model is constructed in single skin glass reinforced polyester, with plywood framings. For the reasons of design simplicity, the screw propeller and rudder were manufactured as geosims of the full-scale originals. In the case of the propeller it means that, because of the higher drag coefficient of the scaled model, it is suboptimal and requiring larger torque and power compared to a redesigned propeller with reduced pitch ratio. In the case of a researchoriented model this presents no major problems and is compensated by a more powerful electric motor. The maximum registered speed of the model is 1.03m/s which is even higher than 0.983 m/s corresponding to the full-scale design speed 15.5 kn. Table 1: Main particulars of the model Length overall, m Length between perpendiculars, m Breadth, m Depth, m Draught, m Displacement, m3 2.590 2.450 0.430 0.198 0.145 0.1156

Fig. 1. Autonomous surface vessel.

3.1 Command and Monitoring Unit The structure of the proposed ashore based CMU is presented in Figure 2. The main objective of the CMU is to facilitate manual and autonomous control of the ASV through the human machine interface (HMI). The CMU mainly consists of several instrumentations; touch panel, GPS unit, industrial Wi-Fi unit, main AC power supply unit, DC power supply unit. The National Instruments (NI) TPC-2512 touch panel is used as the HMI, which is connected with an industrial Wi-Fi unit for communication with the CCU. The unit consists of 500 MHz processor with 512 MB DDR SDRAM and a 4 GB compact flash card with Windows XP embedded operating system. The 12 touch panel works as a data display unit and an automatic and manual control unit for the ASV. Novertel FlexPak G2 GPS unit is used in the CMU for position estimation of the ASV. The onboard GPS unit includes a GNSS (global navigation satellite system) antenna to receive and convert the electromagnetic signals transmitted by the GNSS satellites. Furthermore, the complete RTK GPS system consists of two units: base station (ashore) and rover station (onboard) which greatly improves the accuracy of the position estimation. The base GPS station unit acts as a stationary reference that transmits known stationary position correction signals for the rover GPS station that is located in the ASV. The ELPRO 240-E industrial Wi-Fi (wireless Ethernet) unit is used for communication between the ashore based CMU and the onboard CCU. The unit consists of 2.4 GHz direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) wireless transceiver with 100 mW of Radio Frequency (RF) power with the wireless data transmission rate up to 11Mb/s. The network topology in this system is considered as: the ashore based CMU unit is an access point and the on-board CCU is a client. The shore based access point unit acts as a master unit for the CMU. The on-board client unit acts as a slave unit for the CMU. Furthermore, both units are configured into a bride type Ethernet local area network (LAN), through an industrial Ethernet switch. The unit includes a radio antenna and can be operated around the range of 1 km. An APC Smart-UPS SUA2200 (RT 2200VA, 230V) uninterruptible power supply (UPS) tower unit that is associated with power capacity of 2200VA (1540W) and nominal input

The developed ASV is controlled by a real-time navigation platform; the real-time navigation platform is divided into two sections of hardware structure and software architecture that are further discussed in following sections. 3. HARDWARE STRUCTURE The hardware structure consists of all sensors and actuators that have been used in the real-time navigation platform. The hardware structure is further divided into two units of: command and monitoring unit (CMU) and communication and control unit (CCU). Both units are further described in following sections.

Fig. 2. Command and monitoring unit

and output voltage of 230V is used for the overall power requirements in the CMU. However, all units in the CMU are powered by the UPS unit and that is also complemented by NI PS-17 DC power supply unit. The DC power supply unit consists of the power input of 86 to 276V AC and the power output of 24 to 28V DC at 20A. 3.2 Communication and Control Unit The proposed CCM is implemented aboard the model as presented in Figure 3. The main objective of the CCM is to implement a real-time control process that is associated with course, heading and speed controls of the ASV. The CCM consists of following instrumentations; CompactRIO units, industrial Ethernet switch (IES), touch panel, GPS unit, inertial measurement system (IMS), industrial Wifi unit, DC motors with encoders, position sensor, fiber-optic gyrocompass (FOG), batteries and fuses units. The CCU consists of two data acquisition systems (DAQ) of National Instruments (NI) CompactRIOs: the CompactRIO 9074 and CompactRIO 9004. Those units are powered by an onboard battery through the fuse unit. CompactRIO is an integrated DAQ system that combines real-time processors with reconfigurable field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA). That facilitates swappable I/O connectors with in a single unit for digital data acquisition with custom input/output (I/O) timing. The FPGA is a high performance chip that can reconfigure by the VHDL software platform, which is a hardware description language used in electronic design automation for custom timing, triggering, synchronization, control and signal processing in the analog and digital sensors, actuators and DAQs. The CompactRIO 9074 unit consists of a 400 MHz industrial real-time processor with a 2M gate FPGA and has eight slots for NI C Series I/O modules with the operation power of 19 to 30 VDC. The system also consists of 128 MB of DRAM for embedded operation and 256 MB of nonvolatile memory for data logging. The CompactRIO 9004 consists of a 195 MHz industrial real-time processor with 64 MB of DRAM memory and 512 MB of a nonvolatile Compact-Flash storage for data logging. Furthermore, it has eight slots for NI C Series I/O modules with the operation power of 9 to 35 VDC.

Fig. 3. Communication and control unit

Both units consist of two 10/100 Mb/s Ethernet ports and a RS-232 serial port that can be used for conducting programmatic communication over a network or a personal computer. The communication over a network approach for the CompactRIOs has been used in this study. Furthermore, both units are powered by the battery units through the fuse units. The CompactRIO 9074 unit is connected with the IMU and GPS units. The CompactRIO 9004 unit is connected with the rudder and propeller sub-systems (see Figure 3). Both units are connected through the IES for the network communication. A general structure of the CompactRIO unit that has been connected with the sensors, actuators and touch panel units is presented in Figure 4. The CompactRIO unit consists of various connection adapters that can also be identified as I/O modules. The I/O modules consist of the signal attenuation

entry-level switch for the standard Ethernet networking protocol. That also consists of an operation range of 24V DC that is supported by the on-board a battery unit through a fuse unit. Another NI TPC-2512 touch panel is used as the HMI that is connected with the Ethernet switch to observe the sensor and actuator conditions in the ASV that is also powered by a battery unit through a fuse unit. Another onboard Novertel FlexPak G2 GPS unit is used in the CCU to estimate position for the ASV. The unit consists of a GNSS antenna and a RS-232 port that is connected to the CompactRIO unit through the NI 9870 module. The crossbow NAV440 IMU is used in the CCU that has been powered by an onboard battery unit through a fuse unit. The IMU consists of the following sensors: magnetometer, accelerometer, rate gyro, GPS receiver. The magnetometer is capable of measuring the 3-axis angles of heading, roll, and pitch. The rate gyro is capable of measuring the 3-axis angular velocities of heading, roll, and pitch. The accelerometer is capable of measuring 3-axis linear accelerations of surge, sway and heave. The internal GPS receiver in the IMU is measuring the ASV position is facilitated by the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) capabilities. A multi-state configurable extended Kalman filter (EKF) is utilized to estimate the sensor bias values and to correct the drift errors. The sensor data has been observed by a high-speed A/D converter and a digital signal processor (DSP) that are in-cooperated with a bank of programmable FIR filters. Finally, the processor outputs of navigation data are collected via the RS-232 port that is connected with the CompactRIO unit through the NI 9870. The digital data output of the RS-232 port communicates with a fixed rate of 100Hz with the CCU. Another ELPRO 240-E industrial Wi-Fi unit is used for communication between the ashore based CMU and the onboard CCU that is connected through the uninterrupted Ethernet switch. The onboard industrial Wi-Fi unit is configured as a client unit acting as a slave unit, which is powered by an onboard battery unit through a fuse unit. A Maxon graphite brushed DC motor Re-max 29, 22W, with a GP32C gearbox, 5.8:1 gear reduction and an MR encoder with 500counts/turn are used in the propeller actuation subsystem. The DC motors operates around supply voltage 24V and continuous current of 10A. A Maxon graphite brushed DC motor Re 25, 20W, with a GP32A gearbox, 4.8:1 gear reduction and an encoder HED 5540 with 500counts/turn are used in the rudder actuation sub-system. The DC motors operate with 24V voltage and 11A continuous current, which are powered by an onboard battery unit through fuse units. One should note that the rudder actuations with a DC motor gear have many challenges (Caccia 2006), therefore a rudder position sensor has been introduced into the ASV. A Warbash 1036 RPS rotary position sensor has been used in the system to measure the rudder angle. The rotary position sensor consists of electrical angle maximum of 346 1 deg, resistance range of 5 K with the maximum operation voltage of 30 VDC. The position sensor is powered around 10V by NI 9263 module and the sensor output is measured by NI 9239 module.

Fig. 4. CompactRIO structure.

and filter facilities as well as the digitizer and isolation facilities for better sensor measurements and actuator controls. The CompactRIO unit consists of a reconfigurable FPGA platform that facilitates low-level customization in I/O timing and signal processing to communicate with the realtime processor through a high-speed PCI Bus. The I/O models used in the real-time navigation platform are: NI 9505, NI 9870, NI 9802 , NI 9263 and NI 9239. NI 9505 is a full H-bridge brushed DC servo drive module. Two modules NI 9505 have been used to control the rudder and propeller actuation sub-systems that are associated with two DC motors. The NI 9505 module consists of the inputs of the quadrate encoder reading from DC motor and the power supply voltage and the output of DC motor control (i.e. current or torque). The encoder signal has been used for the velocity control loop in the propeller sub-system and the position control loop in the rudder sub-system. The NI 9505 module can generate pulse width modulation (PWM) signals that are used for control of the rudder and propeller actuation sub-systems. The PWM can also change the rotation direction of the motors as required by both rudder and propeller control systems in which a digital PID controller is implemented. NI 9870 is a 4-Port, RS-232 serial interface module that has been used to collect digital data from the IMS and GPS units. The module consists of four RJ-50 receptacles that provide connections for four RS-232 serial ports. The module consists of an additional input for an external power supply that provides power for the RS-232 transceivers around 8V. NI 9802 is a secure digital removable storage module that is used to store the data collected from the IMS and GPS units. The module consists of two Secure Digital (SD) card slots that consist of two 2 GB cards. NI 9263 is a 4-Channel 16bit, 10 V analog output module that provides the input voltage for the position sensor, which is associated with the rudder position. NI 9239 is a 4-channel, 24-Bit analog input module that is used to collect data from the position sensor. The rudder position has been observed by two sensors: the position sensor and the DC motor encoder to improve the position accuracy. NI UES-3880 industrial Ethernet switch has been used in the CCU as a communication gateway among sensors, actuators, and DAQs being powered by an onboard battery unit through a fuse unit. The Ethernet switch consists of 8-port unmanaged

Fig. 6. Human machine interface in the touch panel

Fig. 5. Software architecture

systems; sensor measurement, GPS display, application management, propeller control, rudder control, mission control, and data management. The sensor measurement tab is displaying the sensor data that have been collected by the IMS; roll, pitch and heading angles, roll, pitch and yaw rates, surge, sway and heave accelerations, north, east and down velocities. The GPS display is displaying the data collected from the GPS units: latitude, longitude and altitude. One should note that two GPS units that have different accuracies are implemented on this system. The steering control tab is responsible for controlling of the DC motor associated with the rudder. The tab consists of a digital knob for controlling the rudder position and a digital display for displaying the actual rudder position is also presented. The speed control tab is responsible for controlling of the DC motor associated with the propeller. The tab consists of a digital knob for controlling the propeller RPM and a digital display for displaying the actual propeller RPM is also presented. The application management tab enables the user to stop, re-boot and restart individual DAQs and program loops in the user interface and CompactRIO units. The stop buttons are introduced in each tab to stop the rudder and propeller controls in emergency situations. The manoeuvre control tab is introduced to implement complex control programmes consisting of series of rudder and propeller control instructions. As presented in Pascoal et al. (2006), Perera et al. (2012a, 2012b, and 2012c) and Dunbabin et al., (2008), course and heading control, position control (i.e. dynamic positioning), trajectory tracking and path following, collision avoidance, cooperative navigation, docking manoeuvres and target tracking type missions will be implemented under this tab. The data management tab is introduced to control the data savings conditions in NI 9802 digital removable storage module. 4.2 Control Sub-system The proposed ASV is associated with a decentralized control approach, where two control sub-systems are introduced: steering control sub-system (SCS) and speed control subsystem (SPS). The main objective of the SCS is to maintain appropriate vessel steering conditions during its manoeuvres. The SCS is associated with rudder controls in the model. A system identification approach for the SCS is presented in
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The OCTANS II fiber-optic gyrocompass has been used in the CCU, powered by an onboard battery unit through a fuse unit. The gyrocompass has been used to measure the trueheading of the ASV. The unit consists of a RS-232 port that is connected by the CompactRIO unit through the NI 9870 module. Two units of Autosil Li-Ion rechargeable batteries are used to power the onboard sensors, actuators and DAQs in the ASV providing the maximum output current of 20A and the voltage of 24V. The batteries are connected through fuse units to improve the safety of the respective sensors, actuators and DAQs. 4. SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE The proposed software architecture of the real-time navigation platform is presented in Figure 5. The software architecture consists mainly of LABVIEW programs with consisting several loops: the FPGA loop, real-time loop and TCP/IP loop. The FPGA loop is associated with collecting data from the sensors (i.e. GPS unit and IMS unit) and controlling the actuations in the propeller and rudder subsystems that have been programmed under a reconfigurable FPGA platform, where LABVIEW provides the VDHL software codes. The real-time loop is associated with the reconfigurable FGPA platform and the embedded real-time processor. The associated PID controllers for the rudder and propeller subsystems are implemented under the internal deterministic control loop that has the highest responsiveness, determinism and priority in comparison to other software loops. The data processing and saving for the respective sensors are implemented under the internal non-deterministic data processing loop that has lower priority with compare to the deterministic control loop. The TCP/IP loop is associated with the real-time processor and the HMI that is used for analysis, post-processing, data logging, communications and control of the ASV. The TCP/IP is implemented under wireless communication through the industrial Wi-Fi unit. 4.1 Human machine interface The main HMI is executed on the ashore based touch panel as presented in Figure 6. The touch panel consists of several tab

Perera et al. (2011). The main objective of the SPS is to maintain appropriate vessel speed during its manoeuvres. The speed control system is associated with propeller controls in the ASV. PID based controllers have been used in both propeller RPM and rudder positions controls, where the system identification conditions have not been required. 5. CONCLUSIONS The development of a modern control and navigation platform for an autonomous surface vessel (ASV) is discussed in this paper. The presented hardware structure and software architecture are implemented. The ashore based CMU is used to control the ASV and the ASV consists of the on-board CCU as discussed. The HMI is used for autonomous and manual control of the ASV. The system has been used for some preliminary experimental evaluations and the respective videos of the ASV manoeuvres can be found at the URL: www.youtube.com/thecentec. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work has been made within the research project Methodology for ships manoeuvrability tests with selfpropelled models funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under contract PTDC/TRA/74332 /2006. The first and second authors were supported respectively by a Doctoral and a Post-Doctoral Fellowship of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under contracts SFRH/BD/46270/2008 and SFRH/BPD/ 48088/2008. The work contribution of Miguel Hinostroza and Bruno Gaspar during the test trials is also acknowledged. REFERENCES Brix J. (Ed.) (1993) Manoeuvring Technical Manual, Hamburg: Seehafen Verlag. Caccia, M. (2006) Autonomous surface crafts: prototypes and basic research issues, 14th Mediterranean Conference on Control & Automation, Ancona, pp. 1-6. Dunbabin, M., Lang, B., and Wood, B., (2008), Visionbased docking using an autonomous surface vehicle, in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Pasadena, CA, USA, pp. 1923. Guedes Soares, C., Francisco, R. A., Moreira, L., and Laranjinha, M. (2004). Full-Scale Measurements of the Manoeuvering Capabilities of Fast Patrol Vessels, Argos Class. Marine Technology, 41(1), 7-16. Guedes Soares, C., Sutulo, S., Francisco, R., Santos, F. and Moreira, L. (1999). Full Scale Measurements of the Manoeuvring Capabilities of a Catamaran. Proceedings of the International Conference on Hydrodynamics of High Speed Craft, RINA London, UK. IMO (1993). Interim Standards for Ship Manoeuvrability. IMO Resolution A.751 (18) adopted on 4 November 1993. IMO (1994). Explanatory Notes to the Interim Standards for Ship Manoeuvrability. IMO Circular MSC/Circ. 644. IMO (2002). Explanatory Notes to the Standards for Ship Manoeuvrability. IMO Circular MSC/Circ. 1053.

Kongsberg, (2006) A new reference for dynamic positioning of vessels - hydroacoustic-aided inertial navigation, Exploration & Production: The Oil and Gas Review, pp. 7679. Luo, W. and Zhang, P. (2007). Evaluating the Maneuverability of a New Type of Self-propelled Barge. Journal of Marine Science and Application, 6(4), 44-47. Moreira, L., Santos, F.J., Mocanu, A., Liberato, M., Pascoal, R., Guedes Soares, C., (2008), Instrumentation used in guidance, control and navigation of a ship model, 8th Portuguese Conference on Automatic Control, Vila Real, Portugal, IFAC, pp 530-535. Moreira, L., and Guedes Soares, C., (2011) Autonomous ship model to perform manoeuvring tests, Journal of Maritime Research, vol. 3, no. 2, pp 29-46. Pascoal, A., Silvestre, C., and Oliveira, P., (2006), Vehicle and mission control of single and multiple autonomous marine robots, ser. IEEE Control Series, ch. 17, pp. 353 386. Perera, L.P., Oliveira, P., and Guedes Soares, C., (2011) Dynamic parameter estimation of a nonlinear vessel steering model of ocean navigation, in Proc. 30th Int. Conf. on Ocean, Offshore and Arctic Engineering (OMAE2011), Rotterdam, The Netherlands, ASME paper OMAE201150 249. Perera, L.P., Carvalho, J.P., and Guedes Soares, C., (2012a) Intelligent ocean navigation & fuzzy-Bayesian decision-action formulation, IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, vol 37, no 2, 2012, pp 204-219. Perera, L.P., Oliveira, P., and Guedes Soares, C., (2012b) Vessel detection, tracking, state estimation and navigation trajectory prediction for the vessel traffic monitoring and information process. IEEE Transactions of Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2012 (doi: 10.1109/TITS.2012.2187282). Perera, L.P., and Guedes Soares, C., (2012c) Pre-filtered Sliding Mode Control for Nonlinear Ship Steering associated with Disturbance. Ocean Engineering, vol. 51, 2012, pp. 49-62. Philips, A. B., Stephen, R. T. and Furlong, M. (2009). Evaluation of Manoeuvring Coefficients of a Selfpropelled Ship using a Blade Element Momentum Propeller Model Coupled to a Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes Flow Solver. Ocean Engineering, 36(1516), 1217-1225. Sutulo S., Guedes Soares C. (2011), Mathematical Models for Simulation of Manoeuvring Performance of Ships, In: Marine Technology and Engineering, C. Guedes Soares et al. (Eds.), Taylor & Francis Group, London, , pp. 661-698. Sutulo, S., Moreira, L. and Guedes Soares. C. (2002). Mathematical Models for Ship Path Prediction in Manoeuvring Simulation Systems. Ocean Engineering, 29(1), 1-19.