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Research on a Support System for Automatic Ship Navigation in Fairway

In previous investigations, controllers for the track-keeping of ships were designed with the assumption of constant ship speed. However, when navigating in a fairway area, the ship’s speed is usually decreased to prepare for berthing. The existing track-keeping systems, which are applied when the ship navigates in the open sea with a constant ship speed, cannot be used to navigate the ship in the fairway. In this article, a support system is proposed for ship navigation in the fairway. This system performs three tasks. First, the ship is automatically controlled by regulating the rudder to follow planned tracks. Second, the ship’s speed is reduced step by step to approach the berth area at a low speed. Finally, at low speed, when the ship’s rudder is not effective enough to control the ship’s heading to a desired angle, the ship’s heading is adjusted appropriately by the bow thruster before changing the control mode into the automatic berthing system. By the proposed system, the automatic systems can be combined to obtain a fully automatic system for ship control. To validate the effectiveness of this proposed system for automatic ship navigation in the fairway, numerical simulations were conducted with a training ship model.