The Design of Dynamic Ship Positioning Control Systems Using Extended Kalman Filtering Techniques

Recent dynamic positioning systems have involved the use of a Kalman filter, in a state estimate feedback control scheme, based upon the separation principle of stochastic optimal control theory. Both linear and non-linear filtering schemes have been proposed for this application. A new extended Kalman filtering scheme is introduced which has an improved performance relative to previous designs. This system is compared with one based upon a linear Kalman filter.