Symbolic Control for Autonomous Docking of Marine Surface Vessels

TL;DR

This paper presents a hierarchical symbolic control architecture for autonomous marine vessel docking, providing formal safety guarantees and validated through simulations and physical experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a real-time symbolic control method for vessel docking with formal safety guarantees, validated on physical scale model experiments.

Findings

Successful simulation of docking maneuvers with obstacle avoidance

First physical experiments on a scale model vessel

Enhanced safety and performance in autonomous docking

Abstract

We develop a hierarchical control architecture for autonomous docking maneuvers of a dynamic positioning vessel and provide formal safety guarantees. At the upper-level, we treat the vessel's desired surge, sway, and yaw velocities as control inputs and synthesize a symbolic controller in real-time. The desired velocities are then executed by the vessel's low-level velocity feedback control loop. We next investigate methods to optimize the performance of the proposed control scheme. The results are evaluated on a simulation model of a marine surface vessel in the presence of static obstacles and, for the first time, through physical experiments on a scale model vessel.