Cooperative robotic maneuvers for emergency ship towing operations

This paper proposes the employment of marine robotic platforms for emergency ship towing operations. Automatic guidance algorithms are developed with the aim of providing cooperation and coordination of robots' motion. In particular a line-following technique is proposed as well as an improvement to a virtual target based path-following technique in order to take into account the modeling of a moving reference path. To prove the validity of the proposed concept, a set of experimental results is also reported. © 2013 IEEE.