Robust autopilot with wave filter for ship steering

Abstract

Research was done to overcome traditional problems associated with automatic steering systems of a ship in a seaway. A ship's dynamic model with wave disturbances was built and a wave filter was designed by means of an extended states observer (ESO). The model estimated the low frequency motion component from a heading measurement corrupted by colorednoise, so back-and-forth steering caused by high frequency wave disturbances was avoided. At the same time, a robust autopilot system, designed by variable structure control theory, was presented. Simulation results achieved in dangerous sea status show that the wave filter works very well and the autopilot has strong robustness to environmental disturbances and model perturbation, and more importantly, the frequency of rudder adjustments is reduced noticeably.

Keywords

autopilot / wave disturbances / variable structure control / wave filter / extended states observer (ESO)