A STUDY ON IMPLEMENTATION OF AN AUTO-STEERING SYSTEM FOR RECREATIONAL MARINE CRAFTS USING ANDROID PLATFORM AND NMEA NETWORK

Abstract

This thesis deals with development of an autopilot system for leisure Yacht based on NMEA 2000 network and android platform. The developed system can operate both for manual steering and automatic navigation mode. In automatic steering mode, after manipulation of commands which are NMEA 0183 sentences by android platform, our system translates and sends the packets through NMEA 2000 network and the controller which is connected to NMEA 2000 network receives the commands and controls the boat’s rudder system automatically.

The automatic steering mode will be achieved by cooperation of two controllers

one for controlling the rudder system, and another for controlling the vessel’s heading. For this reason we have developed a PID controller with an adjustable dead-band gain and a supervisory controller inside dead-band area for the rudder system and a proportional controller to control the heading angle. The reason of using supervisory controller inside rudder controller’s dead-band block is to eliminate the steady-state error which occurs after applying dead-band block to the controller. This supervisory controller is an integral controller which specifically supervises the rudder’s behavior inside the dead-band area. In this study at the first stage we simulated our system in computer, and examined the proposed method’s feasibility. Next step was implementing the system on a real hydraulic steering model developed by us and at the end we finished the examination by implementing it on a real boat and doing test navigation.