An Adaptive Auto Pilot for a Sailing Yacht

Abstract

The paper reports the design and software implementation of an adaptive autopilot for a sailing yacht. The method adopts an extended Kalman filter to estimate time varying system parameters. The estimator is combined with a weighted control minimum variance controller to ensure both efficient course keeping and optimal response to course alterations. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the autopilot on a number of simulated models. The results presented show that the proposed autopilot works well for time varying system models subjected to sea disturbances.