Model Predictive Control for Safe Path Following in Narrow Inland Waterways for Rudder Steered Inland Vessels*

The automation of inland waterway vessels for the transportation of goods offers great potential to increase safety and reduce the environmental impact of the transport sector but is challenging due to the large vessels and narrow waterways. Accurate path tracking is necessary for narrow rivers and canals. In addition, inland vessels possess high inertia and often are under-actuated during en-route traveling. Therefore, foresighted driving is necessary to keep an inland vessel within the fairway and avoid collisions with obstacles, such as encountered vessels. In this paper, a model predictive path following control is presented for purely rudder-steered inland vessels to enable safe driving through rivers and canals. Path following is achieved by minimizing the cross-track error between the bow of the vessel and the reference path in the cost function. A constructive solid geometry (CSG) approach ensures that the vessel always remains in the fairway. For collision avoidance with an obstacle, a dual formulation of the signed distance is used, which considers the convex geometries of the vessel and the obstacle. It is shown by means of Matlab/Simulink simulations on a section of the DortmundEms Canal that the developed controller is capable of steering a 105m long vessel safely through the canal section.