Online Estimation of Near-Surface Water Current Fields Using Horizontally Mounted ADCPs on Inland Vessels

European Navigation Conference (ENC), pp. 1–10

Abstract

Knowledge of the near-surface current conditions along rivers allows improved planning of fuel-efficient shipping routes and the development of accurate automatic track keeping and maneuvering systems for inland vessels. This paper investigates the use of acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCP) mounted horizontally on moving vessels to generate adaptive maps of water current fields close to the surface. A new method is proposed that uses a probabilistic Gaussian process model in combination with a Kalman filter update step to model the current field. This approach allows to condense the incoming stream of measurement data to a manageable set of velocity vectors at predefined grid points. A probabilistic model enables to take localization uncertainty and ADCP measurement noise into account and delivers information about the confidence level of the model at different locations. Simulation results are presented that demonstrate a fast and accurate adaption to an exemplary ground truth current field.

Authors 3

1. Martin Kosch Aachen Institute of Automatic Control (IRT)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Automatic Control, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, GERMANY

2. René Zweigel Aachen Institute of Automatic Control (IRT)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Automatic Control, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, GERMANY

3. Dirk Abel Aachen Institute of Automatic Control (IRT)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Automatic Control, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, GERMANY