Disturbance Rejection by Acceleration Feedforward for Marine Surface Vessels

Acceleration signals have a powerful disturbance rejection potential in rigid body motion control, as they carry a measure proportional to the resulting force. Yet, they are seldom used, since measuring, decoupling, and utilizing the dynamic acceleration in the control design is not trivial. This paper discusses these topics and presents a solution for marine vessels building on conventional methods together with a novel control law design, where the dynamic acceleration signals are used to form a dynamic referenceless disturbance feedforward compensation. This replaces conventional integral action and enables unmeasured external loads and unmodel dynamics to be counteracted with low time lag. A case study shows the feasibility of the proposed design using experimental data and closed-loop high fidelity simulations of dynamic positioning in a harsh cold climate environment with sea-ice.