Heading and Path-Following Control of Autonomous Surface Ships Based on Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning

Autonomous ship control faces significant challenges due to the diversity of ship types, the complexity of task scenarios, and the uncertainty of dynamic marine environments. These factors limit the effectiveness of traditional control approaches that rely on explicit dynamics modeling and handcrafted control laws. With the rapid advancement of computing and artificial intelligence, imitation learning offers a promising alternative by directly learning expert behaviors from data. This paper proposes a Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) method for heading and path-following control of autonomous surface ships. It employs an adversarial learning structure, in which a generator learns control policies that reproduce expert behavior while a discriminator distinguishes between expert and learned trajectories. In this way, the control strategies can be learned from expert demonstrations without requiring explicit reward design. The proposed method is validated through simulations on a model-scale tug. Compared with a behavioral cloning (BC) baseline controller, the GAIL-based controller achieves superior performance in terms of path-following accuracy, heading stability, and control smoothness, confirming its effectiveness and potential for real-world deployment.