Determination of dynamic flexure model parameters for ship angular deformation measurement

In ship angular deformation measurement, Kalman filter used to estimate the deformation angle requires accurate dynamic flexure parameters. Traditionally, these dynamic flexure parameters are empirically set according to previous experience or determined from previously collected experimental data. Inevitably, the Kalman filter will perform poorly when the current application environment is differ with those used in the filter design. To overcome this problem, we propose an alternative online approach to estimate the dynamic flexure parameters based on the attitude difference measured by two laser gyro units. Specifically, the Tufts-Kumaresan (T-K) method is introduced to solve the unknown parameters of the dynamic flexure model from the computed attitude difference. Simulation results show that the proposed method can estimate the dynamic flexure parameters in real-time with a high degree of accuracy even in serious noise polluted conditions. A further advantage of the proposed approach is that it does not require a priori knowledge of the dynamic flexure characteristics.