Solgenia -- A Test Vessel Toward Energy-Efficient Autonomous Water Taxi Applications

TL;DR

This paper reviews the Solgenia autonomous vessel as a test platform for advancing energy-efficient water taxis, integrating recent methods in control, vision, and collision avoidance to promote sustainable urban water transport.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of Solgenia and introduces it as a test vessel for real-world experiments in autonomous water taxi applications, highlighting recent methodological advancements.

Findings

Solgenia serves as a versatile test platform for autonomous water taxis.

Recent methods in control and vision are integrated into Solgenia.

The platform facilitates real-world testing to accelerate development.

Abstract

Autonomous surface vessels are a promising building block of the future's transport sector and are investigated by research groups worldwide. This paper presents a comprehensive and systematic overview of the autonomous research vessel Solgenia including the latest investigations and recently presented methods that contributed to the fields of autonomous systems, applied numerical optimization, nonlinear model predictive control, multi-extended-object-tracking, computer vision, and collision avoidance. These are considered to be the main components of autonomous water taxi applications. Autonomous water taxis have the potential to transform the traffic in cities close to the water into a more efficient, sustainable, and flexible future state. Regarding this transformation, the test platform Solgenia offers an opportunity to gain new insights by investigating novel methods in real-world experiments. An established test platform will strongly reduce the effort required for real-world experiments in the future.