Refereed The Prediction of Ship Motions and Attitudes using Artificial Neural Networks

Due to the random nature of the ship’s motion in an open water environment, the deployment and the landing of air vehicles from a ship can often be difficult and even dangerous. The ability to reliably predict the motion will allow improvements in safety on board ships and facilitate more accurate deployment of vehicles off ships. This paper presents an investigation into the application of artificial neural network methods trained using singular value decomposition and conjugate gradient algorithms for the prediction of ship motion. It is shown that accurate predictions of up to ten seconds can be achieved.