Estimation Methods for Marine Automation

Recently, there has been a high activity within marine automation in order to cut costs and emissions and improve safety and performance. Many approaches rely on accurate information about the properties of the marine vessel and its behavior over time. Hence, this subproject about marine automation is focused on both system identification and sensor fusion problems for large marine vessels. Different sensors are used to estimate unknown parameters in mathematical ship models as well as the relevant state variables. Furthermore, it is investigated which properties of the wind, wave and current excitations that can be derived from the data. The resulting estimation algorithms are intended for commercial applications such as trim optimization, route planning and power management for large ships and there are thus strong connections to optimization and control.

Key topics:

• The use of different sensors for the estimation of relevant ship parameters such as the center of gravity or moments of inertia.
  
• Separation of the effects of wind, waves and currents in the model or state estimation.
  
• The use of the estimated models and parameters or the developed state estimators for control or decision support.