Aditya Kailas Jadhav
A 1:75.5 scaled model of the Panamax class single screwed Kriso Container Ship (KCS), named as Matsya, was designed and fabricated by the Marine Autonomous Vehicles (MAV) Laboratory, IIT Madras. The model is capable of self propulsion with the help of four 12 V (48 V total) batteries onboard. The heading is controlled using the rudder fitted behind the propeller. The rudder is actuated using an onboard stepper motor, which is a unipolar stepper. The propeller is powered by a 48 V brushless DC motor. The onboard electronics include a RaspBerry Pi 4 Single Board Computer (SBC) and two Arduino Uno microcontrollers. A 48 V to 12 V and a subsequent 12 V to 5 V stepdown is performed using the onboard electronics. All the electronics is compactly placed in an Ingress Protection Box with an IP rating of IP67.
The CAD modeling of the vessel along with the shafting arrangement was performed in AutoDesk Fusion 360 software. The resistance of the model was estimated based on appropriate scaling of the experimental results published on the web. Based on the resistance estimated the propulsion system requirements were formulated.
The vehicle is currently being tested with different algorithms which include investigation of reinforcement learning-based control for trajectory tracking, cooperative control with other unmanned vehicles, testing of various under-actuated control algorithms, and investigating the effect of maneuvering in waves.