Automated yacht mooring

Abstract

Automated yacht mooring is seen by many as a future possibility wherein one would enter a marina, select a berth and automatically moor one's yacht in the desired place. With this project, we intend bringing the future to the present as we will be developing, testing and implementing such a system, whereby upon selecting the desired berthing location the system will take over and moor the boat without any immediate intervention from the user. The system will not make use of any modern technologies such as the azipod propulsion systems, as this project is aimed at mass production boats, these being old motor yachts or new motor yachts, which most often do not have such advanced technology onboard. The boats will instead make use of two standard shaft driven engines. A layered fuzzy logic control was designed and implemented in order to automate the berthing process taking into consideration the dynamics, momentum and motion of the boat and sea characteristics. The layered fuzzy logic controller, path planning and the position tracking modules have been tested on both a virtual yacht simulator as well as on an actual model boat.