A speed control strategy for an autonomous ship model for towing tank testing

This paper presents the strategies used to develop a speed control system for a ship model. This speed control is a part of a larger control and data acquisition system on board of an autonomous ship model that is being specifically developed to perform towing tank testing. Taking into account the requirements for this speed control system, and that the speeds to be measured are about one meter per second, a Laser Rangefinder is used as mean for measuring the speed of the model. This is quite unusual because these devices are just intended to measure distances between motionless objects. Various approaches used for setting up the controller are also presented.