Movement persuit control of an offshore automated platform via a RAM-based neural network

The reproduction of the movements of a ship by automated platforms, without the use of sensors providing exact data related to the numeric variables involved, is a non-trivial matter. The creation of an artificial vision system that can follow the cadence of said ship, in six axes of freedom, is the goal of this research. Considering that a real time response is a requisite in this case, it was decided to adopt a Boolean artificial neural network system that could identify and follow arbitrary interest points that could define, as a group, a model of the movement of an observed vessel. This paper describes the development of a prototype based on the Boolean perceptron model WiSARD (Wilkie, Stonham and Aleksander´s Recognition Device), that is being implemented in the C programming language on a desktop computer using a regular webcam as input.