Problem of Stopping Vessel at the Waypoint for Full-Mission Control Autopilot

The paper presents a controlling method to control vessel of a full mission autopilot at the transitional phase when vessel reduce speed from navigation speed down to manoeuvring speed while she accesses to the manoeuvring waypoint, where the vessel is started control in manoeuvring mode. The vessel is con-trolled by three propellers: the bow thruster, the stern thruster and the main propeller. The autopilot is designed with 5 fuzzy logic controllers. It works in Matlab-Simulink and tested on a scaled physical model of a tanker in the lake environment.