Predictive ship longitudinal following control considering diesel engine propulsion

Multi ship cooperative navigation has significant advantages in maritime search and rescue, resource exploration, polar navigation, and other fields. Among them, ship longitudinal following control is the core of ship cooperative navigation. The essence of the ship-following control is adaptive regulation of ship spacing. Considering that the power of ship motion is mainly provided by diesel engines, the ship spacing control should take the propulsion of diesel engine as control inputs. The longitudinal dynamic model and the expected ship spacing model of the ship are firstly built, and the ship following prediction model is also built based on the principle of compensation extended state observer. A target function of the ship-following control considering the propeller rotation speed constraint is then designed, and the real-time optimization problem is solved with the model predictive control (MPC) algorithm. To achieve the desired rotation speed control and ship longitudinal following control, the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) algorithm is used to control the rotation speed. The method is simulated by container in Marine Systems Simulator (MSS) toolbox. Simulation results show that the proposed ship longitudinal following control method considering diesel engine propulsion can achieve stable ship-following on the premise of safety and efficiency with different motions of the preceding ship.