Trends in marine control systems

Sperry and Minorski are names synonymous with the development of the first steering autopilots and it is well known that their pioneering work and seminal publications led to the introduction of the three-term or proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller for automatic ship steering. Despite the efforts and enthusiasm of numerous researchers, from all areas of control engineering, to persuade industry to adopt more sophisticated controller designs, PID controllers remain the industry preference and industry standard for automatic control systems. The paper sets the scene with a review of the early developments of automatic control systems for ship steering, which led to Sperry's automatic pilot. This is followed by an overview of developments in roll stabilization; integrated ship steering and roll stabilization; unmanned underwater vehicles and unmanned surface vessels. Consideration of over 750 papers presented at the 13 conferences and workshops sponsored by the IFAC Technical Committee on Marine Systems in the period 1992–2008 is used to track recent trends in marine control systems and are the basis for some thoughts on possible future directions for the marine control community.