摘要:AbstractFor future autonomous marine vessels, better understanding of the ship’s behavior and control performance will be essential. Traditional motion control systems for ships decouple the problem into high-level motion control of the ship and thrust allocation to achieve the desired control action through the available actuators. The benefit is a segmented software, aiding in development and commissioning. The drawback of this decoupling is that the high-level controller at best has an approximate model of the capabilities in the thruster system. This typically leads to a mismatch between desired and achieved force especially when the control becomes aggressive. In this paper, a model predictive controller is proposed to solve both tasks simultaneously and overcome this drawback. The controller is based on a low-speed ship and thruster model and the resulting optimization problem is solved using the ACADO toolkit. A simulation study of a supply vessel with only two thrusters is presented to investigate the behavior of the proposed controller close to the boundary of low-speed maneuvering. The results show that there are benefits to incorporating the proposed controller.