ON THE TRACK-KEEPING PERFORMANCE OF A CABLE-SHIP

A cable-ship is required to have the performance to keep its course during laying the submarine, optical fibre cable.The paper deals with an automatic track-keeping control system of a cable-ship during laying and burying of the submarine cable by means of a plough burying machine, developed by the optimal regulator theory. In order to find the effective and practical parameters for track-keeping control the course stability analysis is examined. Furthermore the manoeuvring characteristics of a cable ship are discussed by a simulation study on the viewpoint of track-keeping control.