Modeling, identification and control of a Boat Parking Assistance system

In this paper, the problem of designing a Boat Parking Assistance (BPA) system for a small-scale vessel is addressed. A control-oriented model is derived from the physics underlying the system and gray-box identification is carried out by designing suitable experiments. A 3 DOF cascade control scheme is then implemented to achieve semi-automatic parking and station-keeping. The latter is also shown to be a solid groundwork for future research on fully automatic maneuvering. The proposed strategy is finally tested on stationkeeping and parking of a real vessel.