Ship Motion Control Methods in Confined and Curved Waterways Combining Good Seamanship

For the motion control of ships in confined and curved waterways, from broad coastal channels to narrow river bends, conventional methods often struggle to ensure both tracking accuracy and navigational safety. A key deficiency is the inability of standard algorithms to incorporate the nuanced principles of good seamanship. To address this, a novel, hierarchical adaptive control framework is proposed. The core novelty of this framework lies in its versatile and adaptive guidance rules, which embed maritime practice into the control loop for different navigating scenarios. In general maritime channels with wind and current, these rules function to ensure robust, high-fidelity route tracking. For the most challenging inland river curved channels, it is further enhanced to generate a strategic, non-centerline trajectory that replicates the crucial inland navigational practice of “holding high and taking low”. This is complemented by a reinforcement learning-based strategy at the control layer, which performs real-time tuning of PID gains to adapt to the vessel’s dynamics. The framework’s dual capabilities were systematically validated. The core adaptive algorithms proved effective for robust control in curved channels under wind and current disturbances. Furthermore, the full framework, including the seamanship-informed strategy, demonstrated superior performance in the most complex inland river scenarios. Compared to a conventional controller, the proposed method reduced the peak cross-track error by over 40% and increased the minimum safety margin from the bank by more than 49% under a strong 3 m/s cross-current. An effective solution for motion control is thus provided, bridging the gap between modern control theory and the context-dependent expertise of practical pilotage.