The navigation control system is the brain and center of an intelligent ship, and the safety and economy of the ship's navigation are directly determined by its control performance. Therefore, it is necessary to validate the ship intelligent navigation control system. This paper proposes a general verification platform, the variable stabilized ship, to simulate the sailing state of the target ship at different scales and with different hydrodynamic characteristics.

First, the structure of the variable stability ship is proposed on the basis of the model-following principle, and an analysis is made of the three degrees of freedom movement characteristics. The steady error between the variable stability ship and the target ship is determined by their position errors, and the variable stability controller is built on the basis of sliding mode control. Finally, Matlab simulations are carried which verify that the proposed method can maneuver the variable stability ship to follow the states of the target ship.

Simulation results show that the proposed method maneuver the variable stability ship to follow the states of the target ship.

The results of this study can provide references for the validation and verification of navigational control systems for intelligent ships.