Flanders Hydraulics and the Maritime Technology Division of Ghent University have proposed a hybrid testing platform for the development and validation of motion control algorithms for autonomous navigation in shallow and confined water, which consists of towing tank facilities and simulators. Within this framework, the towing tank at Flanders Maritime Laboratory, Ostend, Belgium, featured in large size, tuneable water depth, and a state-of-the-art free-running system, a series of autonomous manoeuvering tests with increasing complexity are designed and carried out. These manoeuvres, including acceleration with heading keeping, path following, speed control, and their combinations, are enabled by implementing guidance and control algorithms on a physical ship model, namely the benchmark ship KVLCC2 at a scale of 1/75. The controllable environment and large space of the tank basin facilitate the upgrade of the existing algorithms and the development of new algorithms. The definition of the autonomous manoeuvres, experimental setup, and parameter settings are elaborated and the effect of implementing different guidance strategies is discussed. Recorded results demonstrate good agreement between the measurements and the expectations, and control accuracy is quantified with evaluation indices. In summary, the feasibility and flexibility of the testing platform and the effectiveness of the algorithms are proved through extensive experiments. |
