Zigzag manoeuvre This type of manoeuvre is also known as the Z-Manoeuvre or the Kempf Manoeuvre.

In some situations, a ship is required to change its course or heading. Sometimes in rough seas or in
cases of directional errors, the ship may be required to change its direction more rapidly within a limited
span of time. So, the ability to zigzag manoeuvre should be an inherent property in the manoeuvring
characteristics of a vessel, (Sutulo and Guedes Soares 2011). The procedure is as follows: with zero
rudder, achieve steady speed for one minute, then deflect the rudder to 20º, and hold until the vessel
turns 20º, after, deflect the rudder to -20º, and hold until the vessel turns to –20º with respect to the
starting heading and repeat. Each zigzag manoeuvre is defined with two constant parameters: the
heading deviation and the rudder angle deviation. In general, these parameters can be assigned
arbitrary values but, mostly, either both are taken equal to 10 degrees (one speaks then about a 10º/10º
zigzag), or to 20 degrees (20º/20º zigzag)

and the total period for the 20 deg. oscillations is around 60 sec.
Figure 4 presents the 10º/10º zigzag manoeuvre for the “Esso Osaka” ship model, and from this manoeu vre several important
characteristics of the yaw response can be established. The response time (time to reach a given heading) is 18 s, the yaw
overshoot (amount the vessel exceeds ±10 deg) when the rudder has turned the other way) is 6 deg. and the total period for the 20
deg. oscillations is around 60 sec.
From the plots of 20º/20º and 10º/10º zigzag manoeuvres it is clear to see that the response time and the total period are
similar for both cases, but the yaw over shoot angles are different ∼5 deg. This difference is because the yaw moment is
different and proportional to ship rudder deflection

4 EXPERIMENTAL SET-UP

In this section, the experimental set-up is presented, the self-running ship model particularities, software, hardware, place of
tests and results are described. The ASV is a scale model of 2.5 meters, self-propelled and equipped with navigation and
positioning equipment. The tests were conducted in a large pool.

4.1 Chemical tanker self-running ship model

The vessel model used in this study is presented in Fig. 5. It is a scaled model from a chemical tanker built in single skin glass
reinforced polyester with plywood framings and has autonomous control of the navigation and platform, which can be divided
into two components: hardware structure and software architecture. Its design speed is 0.98 m/s. Its main particulars are given in
Table 4.
4.2 Hardware structure
The hardware structure consists of all the sensors and actuators that are used in the ASV real-time navigation and control
platform. The hardware is further divided into two units of command and monitoring (CMU) and of communications and control
(CCU) as described in (Perera et al., 2015).
The main objective of the CMU is to facilitate manual and autonomous control of the ASV that provides a human machine
interface (HMI). As presented in Fig. 6, the CMU consists mainly of several instruments: Laptop, GPS unit, industrial

Wi-Fi unit, Compact-RIO, main AC power supply unit, DC power supply unit and anemometer.
A laptop is used in a HMI that is connected through industrial wi-fi unit for communication with the CCU. The laptop works as a
data display unit as well as an automatic and manual control unit for the ASV. A GPS unit is used in the CMU for position
measurements of the ASV. The unit consists of GNSS (Global navigation satellite system) antenna to absorb the electromagnetic
signals transmitted by the GNSS satellites into RF signals. However, the complete GPS system consists of two units of: base
station and rover station. Both GPS units are used to improve the position accuracy of the ASV that is around the accuracy of ±
20 (cm).
The anemometer is used to measure the relative wind direction and wind speed at the location of tests, the data from the
sensor is acquired using a C-RIO using an analogue input module. All units in the CMU are powered by the shore based main AC
unit that is also complemented by a NI DC power supply unit.

4.3 Software structure

The software architecture is mainly programmed by LABVIEW software, based in the real-time acquisition program used in
Hinostroza et al. (2016a; 2016b). The software architecture consists of several program loops: FPGA loop, real-time loop and
TCP/IP loop. The FPGA loop is associated with collecting data from the sensors (i.e. GPS, IMS and fiber-optic gyrocompass
units) and controlling the actuations of propeller and rudder sub-systems that have been programmed under a reconfigurable
FPGA platform, where LABVIEW provides the VDHL software codes.

4.4 Place of tests

Model tests on the ASV were conducted at a pool shown in Figure 7. The weather was sunny and dry, but some wind was
constantly present, changing its speed (approximately in the interval of 1–2 m/s) and direction as time passed.
The pond was certainly deep enough to neglect any shallow-water effects. The pool has a maximum length of 50 m and
average breadth of 20 m.

4.5 Presentation of results

In this section data recorded from zigzag manoeuvre tests of the chemical tanker model is presented. Three different tests were
performed, zigzag 20º/20º

Figure 7. Location of the pool for the free-running model tests.

 Table 5. Zigzag data recorded.
Data Rudder Data Wind
angle characterist conditions
ics
Z1 20º/20º All Moderate ≈ 2
equipment [m/s]
working,
good data.
Z2 25º/25º Corrupted Too windy ≈
data, not 6 m/s
presented.
Z3 30º/30º All Moderate ≈ 2
equipment [m/s]
working,
good data