Adaptive Kalman Filtering for Dynamic Positioning of Marine Vessels

Dynamic Positioning systems usually include wave filtering functionalities to reduce control actions, and hence wear and tear of the propulsion system. Different approaches for design and parametrization of the wave filter components have been investigated through the years. Anyhow, tuning of these algorithms, especially Kalman filter, is a crucial task for proper function, but systematic guidelines or algorithms are not existing. This paper proposes a method for auto-tuning of Kalman filter for Dynamic Positioning of marine vessels using adaptive algorithms. Existing methods of residual- and innovation-based estimation of covariance matrices are incorporated into a linear Kalman filter and evaluated in simulations. The resulting tuning shows significant improvements in state estimation. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.