Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) are systems with complex and highly nonlinear
dynamics; they are subjected to heavy loads, making control with classical strategies a challenge. In
addition, they experience vibrations due to wind and waves. Furthermore, the control of the blade
angle itself may generate vibrations. To address this issue, in this work we propose the design of
an intelligent control system based on fuzzy logic to maintain the rated power of an FOWT while
reducing the vibrations. A gain scheduling incremental proportional–derivative fuzzy controller is
tuned by genetic algorithms (GAs) and combined with a fuzzy-lookup table to generate the pitch
reference. The control gains optimized by the GA are stored in a database to ensure a proper operation
for different wind and wave conditions. The software Matlab/Simulink and the simulation tool FAST
are used. The latter simulates the nonlinear dynamics of a real 5 MW barge-type FOWT with irregular
waves. The hybrid control strategy has been evaluated against the reference baseline controller
embedded in FAST in different environmental scenarios. The comparison is assessed in terms of
output power and structure stability, with up to 23% and 33% vibration suppression rate for tower
top displacement and platform pitch, respectively, with the new control scheme. Fatigue damage
equivalent load (DEL) of the blades has been also estimated with satisfactory results.
