Survey on hydrodynamic effects on cooperative control of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships

Abstract Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) receive enormous attention in recent years. Compared to an individual MASS, greater efficiency and operational capability can be realized by cooperative MASS. An increasing number of researches propose different methods for cooperative multiple ships, such as cooperative collision avoidance, formation control, etc. However, in existing research, hydrodynamic effects, such as the ship-ship and confined water effects, are ignored when designing motion controllers for ships. In fact, in the cooperative scenarios, MASS are close to each other, where hydrodynamic effects significantly impact ship motions. Neglecting hydrodynamic interactions may lead to control failures. Thus, this paper aims at connecting the research on cooperative control of multi-MASS and hydrodynamic effects. Systematic reviews on existing literature on cooperative MASS are carried out in this work. Subsequently, mentioned cooperative scenarios are analyzed, and the parameters involving hydrodynamic interactions are collected. Then, existing research on hydrodynamic effects related to the cooperative scenarios is reviewed to summarize the impacts of hydrodynamics on cooperative motion control of MASS.