System design and evaluation method for practical development of autonomous ships

Abstract To develop a sophisticated ship system, such as an autonomous ship, experiments using a real ship are essential to evaluate its performance and behavior of the developing system. However, it is difficult to evaluate it installed on various ships, which have different configurations of actuators and sensors. This paper describes a design method of evaluation platform for autonomous ships that easily adapts the target system to different configured ships. The method is based on a distributed architecture, and the system consists of an abstracted hardware driver and target system connected through the communication bus. This paper explains a design method and an example module design. The authors implemented the system using the proposed architecture and showed an example of porting the system to another ship. In addition, this paper discusses the advantages and points to note associated with certification processes, such as classification approvals, when applying the proposed design method to actual development.