Investigation of a Multitasking System for Automatic Ship Berthing in Marine Practice Based on an Integrated Neural Controller

In this article, a multitasking system is investigated for automatic ship berthing in marine practices, based on artificial neural networks (ANNs). First, a neural network with separate structures in hidden layers is developed, based on a head-up coordinate system. This network is trained once with the berthing data of a ship in an original port to conduct berthing tasks in different ports. Then, on the basis of the developed network, an integrated mechanism including three negative signs is linked to achieve an integrated neural controller. This controller can bring the ship to a berth on each side of the ship in different ports. The whole system has the ability to berth for different tasks without retraining the neural network. Finally, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed system for automatic ship berthing, numerical simulations were performed for berthing tasks, such as different ports, and berthing each side of the ship. The results indicate that the proposed system shows a good performance in automatic ship berthing.