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A combined guidance and control concept for autonomous ferries

Abstract Autonomous ferry operation in harbor and coastal areas is especially challenging due to the tendency to impose a high traffic density, prohibited areas, and a wide variety of different traffic participants to the automation task. To this end, we propose a concept for automated guidance and control of harbor ferry fleet operation. Subsequently, we differentiate guidance into a central, on-land scheduling unit and an on-ship trajectory planning unit that generates a set of waypoints and corresponding desired speeds by means of a flatness-based optimal control problem. Moreover, static obstacles are taken into account by means of a dual approach and the trajectory planning is linked to the control module realized as a path following model predictive control autopilot, which also handles dynamic obstacles.