Abstract

For ship control, the Proportional plus Integral plus Derivative (PID) controllers remain common-place. However, increasingly new autopilot strategies, promising higher levels of robustness and/or adaptive qualities, are being proposed as possible successors to the PID. Fuzzy logic is a modern control technique which is currently finding an increasing and diverse range of novel applications, both in its fixed-rulebase and intelligent forms. By means of full scale sea-trials, a newly developed fuzzy logic autopilot is evaluated for both course-keeping and course-changing, and a comparison made to its conventional equivalent.