Safe autonomous berthing requires precise estimation of the relative distance and heading angle of a ship with respect to the quay wall. However, the performance of quay wall detection using shipborne 3D LiDAR (three-dimensional Light Detection and ...
Safe autonomous berthing requires precise estimation of the relative distance and heading angle of a ship with respect to the quay wall. However, the performance of quay wall detection using shipborne 3D LiDAR (three-dimensional Light Detection and Ranging) may be significantly degraded under near range conditions owing to the loss of planar information caused by the limited vertical field of view (FOV) and the geometric interference induced by fenders attached to the quay wall front. Considering these practical limitations in real port environments, this paper proposes a algorithm for quay wall detection and berthing state estimation. In the proposed framework, the 3D point cloud is projected onto a 2D(two-dimensional) plane, after which an azimuth-based 2D scan is performed to mitigate the limitation of the FOV. Moreover, the actual quay wall line is identified by eliminating fender interference on the basis of the geometric parallelism of port structures and differences in point distribution. The proposed algorithm was experimentally evaluated through lateral berthing tests conducted at Ulsan Port using the autonomous test ship Haeyang Nuri. Under near-range conditions, the proposed algorithm achieved the lowest distance estimation error among the evaluated methods, with RMSE_D = 0.0605 m, while maintaining stable relative angle estimation with a maximum angular deviation of 0.7530 º. These results suggest that the proposed method is well suited for quay wall detection and berthing state estimation in full-scale berthing operations at real ports.