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This paper is devoted to an autonomous approach to a moving ship for unmanned vehicles. The problem is introduced and formulated first. Cooperation between the vehicle and the ship is needed, such that the moving ship to be approached is set to move at a constant speed along a straight line or a circle. Hence, an approaching algorithm based on 3-D path generation is proposed. The 3-D vehicle trajectory produced by the path generation realizes smooth transition from the initial pose to the final pose with geometric constraints. The final poses the unmanned vehicle and the ship's reach simultaneously are analyzed and obtained based on 3-D path generation. The related parameters for autonomous navigation of an unmanned vehicle are discussed according to the straight line or the circle that the ship sails along. The approaching algorithm is sequentially summarized. The simulations are conducted, and the results show the effectiveness and real-time performance of the proposed method.
Wang et al. (2015) studied this question.