Problem of Stopping Vessel at the Waypoint for Full-Mission Control Autopilot

The paper presents a method to control a vessel of a full mission autopilot at the transitional phase when the vessel reduces speed from navigation speed down to manoeuvring speed. This is done while she accesses the manoeuvring waypoint, where the vessel control is started in manoeuvring mode. The vessel is controlled by three propellers: the bow thruster, the stern thruster and the main propeller. The autopilot is designed with 5 fuzzy logic controllers. It works in Matlab-Simulink and tested on a scaled physical model of a tanker in the lake environment.