On the Steering Qualities of Ships

While there have been a number of scholarly studies on the steering of ships, the concerned design practice remains quite experiential.On the other hand, the modern devlopments of communication and control engineering offer us a successful method for the analysis and synthesis of the control of various physical systems.Then, the authors have applied the method to the problem of steering of ships, expecting that it supplies a more rational and practical basis of design works.The present paper is the first report of the work, and consists of three parts a glance of steering problems in the aspect of control engineering, the representation of steering characters of a ship with the transfer function, and the determination of the transfer function from experiments with a free self-propelled model or an actual ship.