A Parking Assistance System for Small-Scale Boats

In this paper, the problem of designing a boat parking assistance system for a small-scale vessel is addressed. A control-oriented model is derived from the physics underlying the system, and gray-box identification is carried out by designing suitable experiments. A 3-DOF cascade control scheme is then implemented to achieve semiautomatic parking and stationkeeping. The latter mode is also shown to represent a solid groundwork for future research on fully automatic maneuvering in a harbor. The proposed strategy is finally tested on stationkeeping and parking of a real vessel.