Adaptive Control Based on Neural Network for Ship Sterring Autopilot

The Autopilot is importance for a ship to navigate safely and economically, so we proposes an intelligent reference modeling adaptive controller for ship steering based on neural networks. In order to satisfy the requirements of ship's course control under various sea status, we used fuzzy logic and neural networks to design the feedback controller, used multilayer perceptron neural network to design the reference model and the identification network. In order to enhance adaptive characteristics of the controller, the parameters of membership functions and connection weights etc were revised online with neural network learning algorithm. The results of simulation shown that the performance of the ship controller is valuable and effective.