Time Domain Design of a Marine Target Tracking System Accounting for Environmental Disturbances

Environmental disturbances represent significant challenges to the performance and accuracy of autonomous systems, especially in marine environments, where their impact varies based on disturbance severity and the employed guidance law. This paper comprehensively investigates a marine target tracking system using time-domain simulations incorporating realistic environmental disturbances. Three guidance laws and four key performance indicators are analysed to evaluate system performance under disturbed and ideal conditions. A robust and systematic evaluation pipeline is developed and applied to a case study featuring a scaled tugboat model. This approach provides a reliable method to assess tracking accuracy and robustness in adverse conditions. The results are selected from a wide range of possibilities to show the effect of the disturbances on the selected target tracking motion control scenario with two manoeuvres and two environmental conditions. The results are measured through the selected key performance indicators, and several phases are identified for each manoeuvre to extend the analysis not only to the global KPI values but also to the partial values of defined phases. They reveal the quantitative effects of environmental disturbances, exposing different system behaviours and trends. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed pipeline in quantifying tracking system performance, delivering useful understandings of the system under environmental disturbances. The broader implications of this study are substantial, offering enhanced predictive accuracy for the performance of the analysed systems, particularly in the context of target tracking. Furthermore, introducing numerical key performance indicators facilitates a more rigorous comparison of different system characteristics, enabling informed decisions in designing and optimising autonomous operations in challenging environments.