Parallel Dynamic Control of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships for Automatic Berthing

Unlike the traditional automatic berthing methods being, which lack two-way data flow transmission, this paper investigates the problem of parallel control of fully-actuated maritime autonomous surface ships (MASSs) through virtual-real interaction. By combining artificial MASS system, computational experiments, and parallel execution, a parallel dynamic control method is developed to realize state synchronization mapping between virtual MASS system and actual MASS system. Specif-ically, an extended state observer is proposed to constructed an artificial MASS system, which characterizes the dynamics of actual MASS systems in real-time. Next, in the computational experiments, based on the reference orientation generated by the dipolar guiding vector field and the unknown total disturbance learned by the artificial MASS system, a parallel dynamic control law is designed to guide MASS to achieve the berthing task in a smooth manner. Finally, a parallel dynamic control law drives the actual MASS system to approach the artificial MASS system in a parallel execution, effectively coordinating the state between the virtual and actual systems. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the designed parallel dynamic control scheme for MASS.