Design and Implementation of a Ship–Shore Cooperative Experimental Platform for Unmanned Surface Vehicles

Abstract

Transferring unmanned surface vehicle (USV) algorithms from simulation to physical vessels is constrained by heterogeneous hardware interfaces, degraded wireless links, and ambiguous boundaries between human and autonomous control. This study designs and implements a ship–shore cooperative experimental platform comprising a shore control station, a portable control terminal, and an onboard system. The platform integrates multimodal sensing, private-radio and 4G/5G communication, an independent short-range remote-control (RC) path, and hardware arbitration. Small, safety-relevant commands are transmitted redundantly over the heterogeneous links using a shared application protocol with sequence-based deduplication. A two-dimensional control-authority model separates the authorized control source (shore, portable terminal, or short-range RC) from the active onboard behavior (path following, local collision avoidance, or safety protection) to organize fail-safe degradation and control transfer. Geometric light detection and ranging (LiDAR) obstacle detection and optimal reciprocal collision avoidance provide a representative onboard avoidance workflow. Full-scale vessel tests closed the loop from mission dispatch and command parsing to actuation and status feedback and demonstrated autonomous navigation, human takeover, and local collision avoidance. Across four water environments, the platform recorded 5.39 h of multimodal data over 18.26 km of valid trajectories. The results establish a physical testbed for ship–shore cooperative control, algorithm transfer, and multimodal data acquisition.