The installation of caissons for a breakwater is sometimes interrupted or suspended by severe wave conditions at locations directly facing the Pacific Ocean. During this installation process, winches are hand-operated by several operators under sometimes dangerous conditions due to the operator's proximity to the winches and taut wires. Therefore, it would be desirable to improve these working conditions in order to maintain the safety of workers on the caisson or near the winches. Moreover, since the present caisson installation process depends substantially on the intuition and experience of skilled workers, new installation methods will be needed to prepare future decreases in the labor force.
Based on these needs, the authors developed an automatic installation system that enables automatic construction of offshore breakwaters. This automatic installation system consists of an Engineering Work Station (EWS) with A/D and D/A converters, winches, and an observation system such as a motion measurement system and an optical position measurement device and so on. The EWS includes programs allowing installation work to be performed using two associated units. One is a tugboat support system and the other is an anchor wire system.
At present, hydraulic model experiments on these two systems have been carried out and the experimental results for the tugboat support type automatic installation system have already been reported. Accordingly, an outline of the anchor wire type automatic installation system is mainly provided and the experimental results for this anchor wire system are described and validated in this paper.
