Practical method for evaluating wind influence on autonomous ship operations

The autonomous operations of marine vehicles have recently attracted significant attention. In particular, automation of harbor operations, such as autonomous docking or berthing, is a challenging target. In low-speed harbor operations, the external disturbance of wind is a non-negligible factor. Therefore, the stochastic behavior of gusty wind should be considered in numerical simulations. This study presents a practical computational scheme for generating random wind velocity fields. In the proposed method, the von Kármán’s spectrum [1] and Hino’s wind speed spectrum [2] were fitted by a degree of freedom (1DoF) filter driven by the Wiener process. The corresponding Itô’s equation had the form of the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. By employing the analytical solution of the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process, the wind process was successfully generated without time series repetition. Furthermore, the wind speed and direction processes were also generated from the measured drift and diffusion terms. The spectra of these numerical results are consistent with the observed spectra.