Design and Evaluation of Simple Ship's Automatic Maneuvering System Using Sliding Mode Controller

In this paper, we present a simple automatic ship's maneuvering system using sliding mode controller. In this system, the input chattering in sliding mode control is reduced by introducing the gain scheduling method and the adaptive gain tuning method. Moreover, the ideal target course is generated using the Hermite interpolation method based on the minimum-time maneuvering solution. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed system, computer simulation and actual sea tests carried out using small training ship Shioji-Maru under various conditions. As a result, we can see that the control performance is improved under all experimental conditions by comparing the proposed two systems and PID control which has been used traditionally to automatic maneuvering of the ship.