Thrust control of electric marine thrusters

This paper deals with the problem of the control of thrust generated by conventional bladed propeller of marine thrusters and moved by an electric motor. This paper described a control law based on the estimation of the thrust using two features: an extended Kalman filter to observe the torque and an reversed hydrodynamic model of the propeller to control the thrust by a proportional-integral controller. The performances and robustness of this control law is compared to a PI controller without estimator and to the model-based-velocity control.