The development of autonomous ship motion control is gaining importance in the maritime transportation industry as autonomous ships can improve safety, efficiency, capacity, and environmental impact while reducing labor costs. However, most research on this topic has focused on nonlinear ship models coupled with complex control system designs, which are not feasible for some scenarios such as executing turning maneuver in real-time application for typical mass-produced cargo ships due to needs for high computational capability. To address this issue, this paper presents a practical control-oriented ship model using a superposed nonlinear propeller model on a linear ship motion dynamics. The developed model is validated using standard turning circle tests and a cascaded control algorithm is designed for waypoint tracking. The algorithm is tested with different scenarios to evaluate its ability to move the ship along prescribed trajectories, and simulation results show successful performance of the controller. Overall, this approach provides a reliable and practical solution for controlling autonomous ships in real-time applications.

Autonomous sailing sea drones cannot sail directly into the wind. Headings inside the no-go zone produce too little aerodynamic force for propulsion. An escape heading that is geometrically safe can be unsailable for this reason, a complication that propeller-driven vessels never face. WF-RS, the Wind-Feasible Recovery Supervisor developed in this paper, computes tangent recovery headings around an inflated obstacle boundary, replaces wind-infeasible candidates, and holds one avoidance side through commitment and hysteresis until nominal guidance can resume. A reduced-order planar sailing model is used to compare WF-RS with nominal LOS/tacking guidance, three structural ablations, and a reactive potential-field baseline with no-go projection. Across a deterministic scenario set and 500 paired randomized obstacle encounters under goal-oriented target-completion scoring (each trial continued to goal reach), WF-RS reaches the highest clean target-completion rate, 96.0% (95% Wilson interval 93.9–97.4%), with a 4.0% obstacle-contact rate against 11.6–53.6% for the comparators, and every trial reaching the goal. Prolonged residence inside the no-go sector is logged as a diagnostic. The performance statistics come from simulation with a non-identified model. A processor-in-the-loop (PIL) test additionally verifies execution of the controller on a TI LAUNCHXL-F28379D C2000 target over a 115,200 baud serial link. These results are limited to simulation and PIL testing. Sea trials are future work.