ON-LINE DYNAMIC SENSING OF SHIP'S ATTITUDE BY USE OF A SERVO-TYPE ACCELEROMETER AND INCLINOMETERS

For an accurate on-line measurement of the ship's attitude the paper develops an intelligent sensing system which uses one servo-type accelerometer and two servo-type inclinometers appropriately located on the ship. By considering the dynamics of the servo-controlled rigid pendulums of the inclinometers, linear equations for the rolling and pitching of the ship are derived separately from each other. Moreover, one accelerometer is used for extracting the heaving signal. Through the introduction of linear dynamic models and the linear observation equations for the heaving, rolling and pitching, the on-line measurement of the three signals can be reduced to the state estimation of the linear dynamic systems. A bank of Kalman filters is adaptively used to achieve the on-line accurate state estimation and to overcome changes in parameters in the linear dynamic models.