An Idea of Heading Control for Air Cushion Vehicles

Air cushion vehicle (ACV) is one type of high performance watercraft. ACV can be propelled forward over the water, the ground and swale. It is widely used in both the civilian and military. Its operation is very different from general ships because of the structural particularity. The design of PID controller and neural net (NN) controller used for ACV heading control are explained in this paper. Simulations show that NN controller performs better than normal PID controller in heading control of ACV, when ACV is disturbed by wind.