Dynamics Identification and Robust Control Performance Evaluation of Towing Rope under Rope Length Variation

Lately, tugboats are widely used to maneuver vessels by pushing or towing them where tugboats use rope. In order to correctly control the motion of tugboat and towed vessel, the dynamics of the towline would be well identified. In real application environment, the towing rope length changes and the towing load is not constant due to the various sizes of towed vessel. And there are many ropes made by many types of materials. It means that it is not easy to obtain rope dynamics, such that it is too difficult to satisfy the given control purpose by designing control system. Thus real time identification or adaptive control system design method may be a solution. However it is necessary to secure sufficient information about rope dynamics to obtain desirable control performance. In this paper, the authors try to have several rope dynamic models by changing the rope length to consider real application conditions. Among them, a representative model is selected and the others are considered as uncertain models which are considered in control system design. The authors design a robust control to cope with strong uncertain and nonlinear property included in the real plant. The designed control system based on robust control framework is evaluated by simulation.