System Design Laboratory

Autonomous ships have gained a huge amount of interest in recent years, like their counterparts on land–autonomous cars, because of their potential to significantly lower the cost of operation, attract seagoing professionals and increase transportation safety. Technologies developed for the autonomous ships have the potential to notably reduce maritime accidents where 75% cases can be attributed to human error and a significant proportion of these are caused by fatigue and attention deficit. However, developing a high-level autonomous system which can operate in an unstructured and unpredictable environment is still a challenging task. When the autonomous ships are operating in the congested waterway with other manned or unmanned vessels, the collision avoidance algorithm is the crucial point in keeping the safety of both the own ship and any encountered ships. Instead of developing new traffic rules for the autonomous ships to avoid collisions with each other, autonomous ships are expected to follow the existing guidelines based on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs). Furthermore, when using the crane on the autonomous ship to transfer and install subsea equipment to the seabed, the heave and swaying phenomenon of the subsea equipment at the end of flexible wire ropes makes its positioning at an exact position is very difficult. As a result, an Anti-Motion Control (AMC) system for the crane is necessary to ensure the successful installation operation. The autonomous ship is highly relying on the effectiveness of autonomous systems such as autonomous path following system, collision avoidance system, crane control system and so on. During the previous two decades, considerable attention has been paid to develop robust autonomous systems. However, several are facing challenges and it is worthwhile devoting much effort to this. First of all, the development and testing of the proposed control algorithms should be adapted across a variety of environmental conditions including wave, wind, and current. This is one of the challenges of this work aimed at creating an autonomous path following and collision avoidance system in the ship. Secondly, the collision avoidance system has to comply with the regulations and rules in developing an autonomous ship. Thirdly, AMC system with anti-sway abilities for a knuckle boom crane remains problems regarding its under-actuated mechanism. At last, the performance of the control system should be evaluated in advance of the operation to perform its function successfully. In particular, such performance analysis is often very costly and time-consuming, and realistic conditions are typically impossible to establish in a testing environment. Consequently, to address these issues, we proposed a simulation framework with the following scenarios, which including the autonomous navigation scenario and crane operation scenario. The research object of this study is an autonomous offshore support vessel (OSV), which provides support services to offshore oil and gas field development such as offshore drilling, pipe laying, and oil producing assets (production platforms and FPSOs) utilized in EP (Exploration Production) activities. Assume that the autonomous OSV confronts an urgent mission under the harsh environmental conditions: on the way to an imperative offshore construction site, the autonomous OSV has to avoid target ships while following a predefined path. When arriving at the construction site, it starts to install a piece of subsea equipment on the seabed. So what technologies are needed, what should be invested for ensuring the autonomous OSV could robustly kilometers from shore, and how can an autonomous OSV be made at least as safe as the conventional ship. In this dissertation, we focus on the above critical activities for answering the above questions.