Universal Intelligent Ferry Control System

This SBIR project proposes the development of a Universal Intelligent Ferry Control System to meet the Navy's requirement of more capable causeway ferries of operating in sea state 3. Through employing and integrating advanced control approaches and state-of-the-art computer hardware/software techniques, the control system will have the following features: 1) robust, adaptive and reconfigurable control capability, 2) intuitive, operator friendly and easy to use, and 3) low cost, light weight and small size. To achieve the first feature, an integrated three-level control scheme of nonlinear control, robust control and neural fuzzy control is proposed for linearization, decoupling and compensation of thruster causalities, maximum efficiency, robustness against and adaptivity to the varying length and displacement of causeway ferries with or without load. A friendly, easy-to-use and multiple-mode operator interface will be designed to provide ferry status display, mouse function selection, keyboard parameter input, and joy stick/throttle control. The latest proven hardware and software techniques, such as microelectromechanical (MEM), multi-layered integrated circuits, and windows and object-oriented programming techniques, will be utilized to reduce the physical size, weight and manufacturing cost and enhance the reliability. The emphasis of the Phase I project will be on the conceptual design, feasibility study and performance demonstration of the proposed approaches and techniques.