A modular designed dynamic positioning experiment system and its application on a ship model

This paper presents a modular designed dynamic positioning (DP) experiment system. Three modules are designed for the DP experiment system, which are onboard computer module, position sensing module and onshore control computer module. The hardware system and software are introduced. A PC/104 computer is used as the main controller of the onboard computer system, and an ARM microcontroller is used to control the driver devices of the actuators of the subject. An inertial measurement unit (IMU) and two wind direction/speed sensors connected with the PC/104 computer are chosen to measure the subject's motion data and the wind data of the experiment environment. A wireless router offers Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) for the DP experiment system. And a camera is used to get the position data of the subject. Several experiments are done using a DP ship model. The feasibility and effectiveness of the designed DP experiment system are demonstrated by the experiment results.