ABSTRACT
A large cargo ship is a non-linear large inertial motion control system. It is a difficult problem to obtain a heading angle response quickly and accurately to the rudder angle. Most autopilots for large cargo ship steering are based on simple PID control laws with fixed parameters. They do not achieve an ideal effect. In this article, an adaptive PD controller for large cargo ships is proposed. The proportion coefficient and differential coefficient of the adaptive PD controller are adjusted with the tracking error to achieve a faster response with no overshoot. The damping in the system is kept very small for large errors, and large for small errors. The basic theory of the dynamic PD controller is introduced and simulations results are given to validate the efficacy of the proposed method.
