Ship motion prediction for recovery of helicopters

Due to the random nature of the ship's motion in an open water environment, the deployment and the landing of helicopters from a ship can often be difficult and even dangerous. The ability to reliably predict the ship motion will allow improvements in safety on board ships and facilitate more accurate deployment of helicopters off ships. This paper presents an investigation into the application of artificial neural networks trained using singular value decomposition and conjugate gradient algorithms for the prediction of ship motion. This paper presents the results of the application of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) methods for the prediction of ship motion. Other requirements were that the methodology had to be close to real time and independent of ship characteristics so it can be easily implemented on different types of surface vessels.