Research On The Ship Autopilot Test System Based On ARM

With the development of global economy, the advantages of the shipping industry which is based on ship are gradually outstanding. Autopilot’s function is one of the key devices for heading controlling, which influences whether the ship can run safely, efficiently and economically depending on autopilot’s performance. Before loading on the ship, however, autopilot can’t get rudder angle signal and heading signal, so we can’t complete normal function test, which to some extent causes plenty of difficulties in developing, upgrading and maintaining autopilots. To overcome the problems, in this paper, actual autopilot combined with embedded systems and a Ship Autopilot test system based on ARM is designed and implemented.Firstly, according to the working principle of ship control system, a real ship simulation system is designed on the land. The PLC and the stepper motor will replace the real complex hydraulic steering system in ship. A ship model is built in ARM embedded System, and then it simulates the real ship’s movement, processes the rudder angle and generates the heading. After that, I choose the autopilot which can be used in a real ship. Through various characteristics of the hardware, all of the hardware is connected, eventually attributing to forma complete closed-loop system.Then, autopilot test software for the ARM is designed in Qt environment. The first step is building a ship mathematical model in Matlab, followed by transforming it to C document by Matlab Coder. To achieve this goal, I designed the parameter setting interface which can load the operating parameters to ship models. The parameter setting interface can set steering speed, speed of ship and operating environment. Also, a graphic interface is built up, which equips with the functions of displaying track, heading and rudder angle data while simulating ship’s movement. During the process, the IEC61162 communication protocol is parsed, which definitely establishes an agreement basis between the autopilot and the ARM. For telecommunication, the test software for phone is designed. And it also contains the parameter settings and the graphical interface. The Wi-Fi module is joined in ARM. Through the UDP, phone can communicate with ARM.At last, a comprehensive test is taken to the entire system, including the follow and hand steering. The results illustrate that the performance of the hardware is in good order and condition. By turning test and Z-test, the validity of the ship model is verified in ARM. By heading control test, the control performance of autopilot is tested, the results of which demonstrate quite excellent control performance of autopilot. The overall test results show:the ship autopilot test system based on ARM equips with reasonable structures, proper functions, and potential applications.