Many studies have been done in the field of fuzzy logic theory, but it's application is not so much, and particularly, there isn't any application to the ship's steering system, until now. This paper is to survey the effect of application of fuzzy logic control to the ship's steering system. The controller is made up of a set of Linguistic Control Rules which are conditional linguistic statements connecting the inputs and the output, and take the inputs derived from the errors, that is, deviation angle and it's angular velocity. These two variables together give information about the state of the steering system, and the Linguistic Control Rules are implemented on the digital computer. The characteristics of this system were investigated through the computer simulation and satisfactory results compared with that of the conventional PD controller were obtained.

The usual procedure for the optimal design of ship's steering system is to minimize a chosen quadratic performance index, which isdetermined from the view point of economic run. However, the optimal control synthesized in such a straightforward fashion is unsatisfactory because ship's parameters differ from their nominal values due to uncertainties and errors in measurement and/or simplifications in mathematical modelling, and/or the variation of the ship's loading condition. In an attempt to resolve this difficulty, this paper presents a method for designing a low sensitive optimal steering system in a way as to minimize not only given performance index but also the sensitivity of the performance index and trajectory sensitivity. It is also shown that the optimal control so obtained will result in a system whose performance index and transient response are low sensitive to small varation in ship's time constant.