The Design Of The Ship Motion Control System Based On Scale Model Ship

Maritime transport, in its long history, has a close relationship with the nation's development. In order to master the law of ship motion and ship driving skills, our human beings have been struggling for several centuries. The ship motion control has been improved from manual ones to automatic ones, meanwhile, automatic ship products are emerging in the world generation after generation. The performance of the automatic ship products is determined by that of the controller, so the development of ship automation technology is greatly influenced by the innovation of control technology. In the field of ship motion control, a ship motion platform is in need to validate whether the control algorithm is effective and the control system is appropriate during the developing process of autopilots. The safety of navigation can be ensured and, the risk, the energy consumption, the times of actual ship experiments, as well as the amount of experimental costs, can be reduced by application of ship motion platform.A scale model ship control system is described in this paper. The scale model ship which can replace the real ship for ship motion test in a view of control field, is controlled by the scale model ship control system including a upper computer and a lower computer. The scale model ship is the controlled object and physical basis, and it reflects the movement characteristics of the prototype in some way. The lower computer is the executing agency. and various devices on the scale model ship are operated by it. The upper computer is used to run control algorithm. The scale model ship equipped with steering gear, propeller, pan-fit, as well as heading sensor providing heading and GPS receiver providing positioning information, is designed and installed by the manufacturer. Two microcontrollers, a STC12C5A60S2 as master, and a STC12C2052 as slave, as well as peripheral circuits e.g. ADC, DAC, and voltage conversion circuits, are installed in the lower computer placed in the center of scale model ship. The upper computer communicating with the scale model ship through a pair of RF transmitters, is placed on the shore. The scale model ship succeeded being tested in Heart Sea Lake of Dalian Maritime University on July 13th,2009.