RECONSTRUCTING THE SHIP MOTIONS USING COMBINED MARINE SYSTEMS SIMULATOR TOOLBOX AND A SIX-DOF STEWART PLATFORM

Abstract

Characterization of ship motions is greatly essential in evaluating performance of the ship or a ship mounted subsystems. This paper addresses such a challenge by proposing a methodology on reconstructing the ship motions using combined Marine Systems Simulator (MSS) toolbox and a six-DoF Stewart platform. Given the specifications of the ship, Stewart platform and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) system, ship motions are generated and then reconstructed by a six-DoF Stewart platform as a validation. Finding results show that the ship motions are able to be reconstructed and its randomness can be captured with considerable accuracy. However, as the sea state code increases, the accuracy of the proposed method decreases as indicated by the values of sum square error (SSE) of the reconstructed motions. Hence, the proposed methodology can be recommended as ocean waves based ship motions simulator as well as other dynamics system motion simulators.