ATLS: Automated Trailer Loading for Surface Vessels

TL;DR

This paper presents a mathematical framework for automated trailer loading of surface vessels, addressing wind disturbances and perception errors, demonstrated on a commercial pontoon boat with promising success rates.

Contribution

It introduces a novel pipeline combining localization, system identification, and trajectory optimization for trailer loading under challenging conditions.

Findings

Achieved 80% success rate in real-world tests

Effectively handles wind disturbances and perception errors

Demonstrates potential for practical marine automation

Abstract

Automated docking technologies of marine boats have been enlightened by an increasing number of literature. This paper contributes to the literature by proposing a mathematical framework that automates "trailer loading" in the presence of wind disturbances, which is unexplored despite its importance to boat owners. The comprehensive pipeline of localization, system identification, and trajectory optimization is structured, followed by several techniques to improve performance reliability. The performance of the proposed method was demonstrated with a commercial pontoon boat in Michigan, in 2023, securing a success rate of 80\% in the presence of perception errors and wind disturbance. This result indicates the strong potential of the proposed pipeline, effectively accommodating the wind effect.