Measurement of Speed, Height and Direction of SeaWaves Using Optical Range Sensors

The present paper proposes a sensing system for the speed, the height and the direction of sea waves. The measurement of the three quantities is achieved using three optical range sensors which are adequately located over the sea near the platform. For realizing this, the sensor outputs are modeled as outputs of a linear dynamic system and a Kalman filter and maximum likelihood method are applied. Not only a case of one sea wave but also a case of two overlapping sea waves with different directions are considered. The validity of the system is finally verified with simulations and experiments