Phase-Locked Loop and Kalman Filter Strategy to Track Ocean Waves from Mobile Platform IMU Data⁎

This paper proposes a novel approach to estimating the sea state and hence predicting short-term, local wave behaviour from inertial measurements on a slow-moving marine platform. A Kalman filtering strategy consisting of a phase-locked loop and filter based sea state estimator is used to generate local height and angle of arrival estimates. This method offers an improvement over existing Fast Fourier Transform methods as it does not require long time data series to produce results, and enables the prediction of wave behaviour a short time into the future. The ideas are tested in simulation by generating wind waves using a Pierson Moskowitz spectral model. Preliminary measurement results from wave tank tests are also presented.