An autonomous scale ship model for towing tank testing

This paper presents the work done for developing a self-propelled scale ship model for towing tank testing, with the main characteristic of not having any material link to a towing device to carry out the tests. This model has been fully instrumented in order to acquire all the significant raw data, process them onboard and communicate with an inshore station, and all this for both seakeeping and resistance tests. In order to illustrate the applicability and advantages of the proposed model, some results obtained by its application on a towing tank test campaign, aimed at developing a parametric roll detection system, are also presented.