Dynamic Modeling and Simulation of Marine Satellite Tracking Antenna Using Lagrange Method

Marine Satellite Tracking Antenna (MSTA) is a necessary device in ships for receiving satellite signals when they are sailing on the sea. This paper presents a simple methodology to obtain the dynamic equations of MSTA through Lagrange method, which is fundamental in design of modelbased controllers. The detailed derivation procedure of using basis vectors of coordinate system, is presented. Moreover, modern softwares, such as Maple and Matlab, are used for simulating the dynamic model of MSTA, whose results are compared to that from SimMechanics for validation. The proposed methods and tools can be easily applied on other mechanical systems.