An auto weather-vaning system for a DP vessel that uses a nonlinear controller and a disturbance observer

An auto weather-vaning system for a Dynamic Positioning (DP) vessel is proposed. When a DP vessel is operating, its position keeping is hindered by ocean environmental disturbances which include the ocean current, wave and wind. Generally, most ocean vessels have a longitudinal length that is larger than the transverse width. The largest load acts on the DP vessel by ocean disturbances, when the disturbances are incoming in the transverse direction. Weather-vaning is the concept of making the heading angle of the DP vessel head toward (or sway from) the disturbance direction. This enables the DP vessel to not only perform marine operations stably and safely, but also to maintain its position with minimum control forces (surge & sway components). To implement auto weather-vaning, a nonlinear controller and a disturbance observer are used. The disturbance observer transforms a real plant to the nominal model without disturbance to enhance the control performance. And the nonlinear controller deals with the kinematic nonlinearity. The auto weather-vaning system is completed by adding a weather-vaning algorithm to disturbance based controller. Numerical simulations of a semi-submersible type vessel were performed for the validation. The results show that the proposed method enables a DP vessel to maintain its position with minimum control force.