Optimal Control of Dynamic Positioned Vessel Using Kalman Filtering Techniques

A dynamically positioned vessel must be capable of maintaining a specified position and direction by controlling the thruster devices. The motions of a vessel are often assuned to tne sum of low frequency(LF)motions and high frequency(HF)motions. The former is mainly due to wind, current and second order wave forces, while the latter is mainly due to first order wave forces. In order to avoid the high frequency thruser modulation, the control system must include filters to estimate the low frequency motions from the measured motion signals, This paper presents a control system based on Kalman filtering technique and optimal control tyeory. Using the combined kalmam filter, LF motion estimates and HF ones are achieved from the motion measurement of the vessel. The estimated low frequency motions are used as inputs to the dynamic positioning system. The thruster modulation is minimized using the optimal control theory; Linear Quadratic Gaussian(LQG)controller. The performances of the Kalman filter and the dynamic positioned vessel are investigated by computer simulation.