Safe Control of an Autonomous Ship in a Port Based on Ant Colony Optimization and Linear Matrix Inequalities

The autonomous operation of a device or a system is one of the many vital tasks that need to be achieved in many areas of industry. This is also true for maritime transport. This paper introduces an approach developed in order to achieve the autonomous operation of a ship in a port. A safe trajectory was calculated with the use of the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. The ship motion control was based on two controllers: the master overriding trajectory controller (OTC) and the slave low speed controller based on the Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI) method. The control object was the model of a Very Large Crude Carrier Blue Lady. The results of our simulation tests, which show the safe trajectories calculated by the ACO algorithm and executed by the ship using the designed controllers (OTC and LMI), are presented in this paper. The results present maneuvers executed by the Blue Lady ship when at port. The area where the tests were conducted is located in the Ship Handling, Research and Training Center of the Foundation for Shipping Safety and Environmental Protection on the Lake Silm in Kamionka, Poland.