What we have written down

RTGroundControl is Oceanomatics' ground station and autonomy stack for a multimodal task group, surface and air, controlled by a single operator from one console. This paper describes its anti-collision system and the tests it has been put through, on a simulated group of one mothership, four unmanned surface vessels and two fixed-wing unmanned aircraft. A hard admissibility filter has the last word over every command; above it a decision core chooses whole manoeuvres, alter, hold and rejoin, scored against every contact and the water over a receding horizon. The Collision Regulations strike out what they forbid and order what remains, and every manoeuvre is reported with the rule that required it and what it would otherwise have hit. Contacts are predicted by one shared model, encounters carry memory, the ground is a clearance field, the passage is run on paper ahead of the ship, and the fleet is one system in which the guide holds her course and her boats conform. The water is the IHO's S-100 product from the official UKHO and SHOM Channel trial datasets, adopted both to implement the new standard and to hold the chart to S-52, against which it has been audited requirement by requirement. Verification rests on three deterministic baselines regenerated by the test suite, a parameter sweep, several hundred simulated passages and a corpus of corrected radar exam papers; the paper also records the three occasions on which a green benchmark coexisted with a live fault.

μDP (micro dynamic positioning) is Oceanomatics' control stack for offshore vessel models: dynamic-positioning functionality, manual to fully autonomous, on hulls of one to two metres. It develops the control scheme designed in 2019 for a model offshore support vessel, in which a hobby radio mixed the sticks into two azimuth thrusters and a bow tunnel. The stick semantics of that scheme are retained; the mixing is replaced by a force allocator built into ArduPilot's motor library and driven by a table of effectors, so that one method covers propellers and rudders, azimuths, catamarans, water jets and Voith Schneider propellers. The stack adds RTK positioning with GNSS heading, wind feed-forward for station and track keeping, a current estimate, a vessel model identified online and persisted between sessions, a configuration tool that generates every input of the stack from a hull outline and a thruster list, and a simulation chain that runs the trial protocol before wet trials.