In the field of study about the maritime safety system various reports have been given on the research of ship auto control over a long time but lack of auto control designed for auto berthing control. This paper deals with ship"s track keeping control on

This paper presents an improved adaptive neural network autopilot based on our previous study for track-keeping control of ships. The proposed optimal neural network controller can automatically adapt its learning rate and number of iterations. Firstly, the track-keeping control system of ships is described For the track-keeping control task, a way-point based guidance system is applied To improve the track-keeping ability, the off-track distance caused by external disturbances is considered in learning process of neural network controller. The simulations of track-keeping performance are presented under the influence of sea current and wind as well as measurement noise. The toolbox for track-keeping simulation on Mercator chart is also introduced.

In Part I(theoretical study) of the paper, a new adaptive autopilot for ships based on Adaptive Neural Networks was proposed. The ANNAI autopilot was designed for course-keeping, turning and track-keeping control for ships. In this part of the paper, to show the effectiveness and feasibility of the ANNAI autopilot and automatic selection algorithm for learning rate and number of iterations, computer simulations of course-keeping and track-keeping tasks with and without the effects of measurement noise and external disturbances are presented. Additionally, the results of the previous studies using Adaptive Neural Network by backpropagation algorithm are also showed for comparison.

This paper presents a new adaptive autopilot for ships based on the Adaptive Neural Networks. The proposed adaptive autopilot is designed with some modifications and improvements from the previous studies on Adaptive Neural Networks by Adaptive Interaction (ANNAI) theory to perform course-keeping, turning and track-keeping control. A strategy for automatic selection of the neural network controller parameters is introduced to improve the adaptation ability and the robustness of new ANNAI autopilot. In Part II of the paper, to show the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed ANNAI autopilot, computer simulations of course-keeping and track-keeping tasks with and without the effects of measurement noise and external disturbances will be presented.