The main research activity of the Institute of Automation at University of Rostock is the development of new concepts for automated maritime systems with special focus on control of autonomous distributed and cooperating networked systems.
In tight collaboration with industry partners and international research institutions, the institute of Automation has gained extensive experiences especially in the following areas:
- high-precision position acquisition and recording
- modeling and identification of marine vehicles
- guidance and maneuvering of seagoing vessels
- adaptive control and navigation systems for positioning, velocity and heading control of marine vehicles.
To support the researches, the Institute of Automation is equipped with different unmanned water vehicles which are intended and designed as variable measurement and experimental vehicles for coastal area as well as deep sea regions. The vehicles are designed in a way that the interfaces to the sensors and actuators are available such that the low-level and high-level controllers as well as navigation systems could be easily implemented. Moreover, communication links to the land station are considered to enable the possibility of mission intervention and adaptation via operator commands.
Experimental vehicles are:
The infrastructures in the Research Port of Rostock provide a comprehensive platform for validation and evaluation of the developed autonomous systems using different complex application scenarios in a realistic condition.