One Systematic Design Method and Control Performance Evaluation of Heading Control System in Pleasure Boats

The pleasure boat intended in this paper is an outboard motor boat equipped with an outboard motor operating a propeller thrust and a steering angle. Outboard motor boats have a wide variation in the number of outboard motors to be equipped with depending on the size and a shape of the boat itself, and the environmental disturbances peculiar to a boat such as tidal currents and winds greatly influences the heading control performance. Therefore, it is necessary to realize a robust heading control response to environmental disturbances regardless of the variation of boats. There are two challenges for realizing such heading control response. One challenge is ensuring the stability of the control system in the entire speed region from the low-speed region for fishing applications to the high-speed region for mobile applications to which the autopilot function is applied. The other one is the suppression of the deviation in the response time of the heading control response. In response to these challenges, the authors proposed one systematic design method of heading control system to stabilize the control response in the entire vessel speed region to which the autopilot function is applied. We proved the validity of the proposed design method through the cruising test on the boats equipped with the designed heading control system and the numerical simulation.