An innovative, satellite-guided Search-and-Rescue-System is under development. This system utilises an autonomously acting rescue vessel to salvage a person overboard to increase significantly the chance of survival. It was developed to be used on special ships or offshore platforms, where workers have to act in bad weather conditions and often going overboard of a person will be discovered too late.
A substantial challenge is the automation of the autonomously acting rescue vehicle as well as the integration into the superior Search-and-Rescue-Process. The developed cascaded control concepts were designed to ensure the fastest possible approach to the casualty without endangering the person. Therefore, two degrees of freedom control concepts are used to separate the reference values from the disturbances. The inner speed control structure is divided into two parts and consists of the control structure itself with an in-line allocation to the device configuration.
The paper mainly addresses the automation of the rescue vessel, the synthesis of the control system of the autonomously acting vehicle as well as the integration into the superior Search-and-Rescue-Process. Additionally, some test result of this complex system are shown at the end of the paper.