To predict the manoeuvrability of unmanned marine vehicle and improve its manoeuvrability, the parameters of the manoeuvring model of unmanned marine vehicle need to be obtained. Aiming at the inconvenience of obtaining model parameters under the traditional experimental method, this article studies the parameter identification of unmanned marine vehicle’s manoeuvring model based on extended Kalman filter and support vector machine. Firstly, the second-order nonlinear manoeuvring response model of unmanned marine vehicle is discretized by the difference method, and the corresponding data are collected by the manoeuvring motion simulation of the response model. Secondly, the discrete response model is transformed into an augmented state vector based on extended Kalman filter, and the optimal estimation of the state vector is calculated to identify the parameters. And then, the discrete response model is transformed into a support vector machine-based regression model, the collected data are processed and a set of support vectors are obtained to further identify the parameters of the response model. Finally, by comparing the simulation experiments’ results from the original model and the identification model, the recognition results-based extended Kalman filter and support vector machine are analysed and some research results are obtained. The results of this article will provide a powerful reference for the design of unmanned marine vehicle’s motion control algorithm.

Ship course-keeping control is of great significance to both navigation efficiency and safety. Nevertheless, the complex navigational conditions, unknown time-varying environmental disturbances, and complex dynamic characteristics of ships pose great difficulties for ship course-keeping. Thus, a PSO-based predictive PID-backstepping (P-PB) controller is proposed in this paper to realize the efficient and rapid course-keeping of ships. The proposed controller takes the ship’s target course, current course, yawing speed, as well as predictive motion parameters into consideration. In the design of the proposed controller, the PID controller is improved by introducing predictive control. Then, the improved controller is combined with a backstepping controller to balance the efficiency and stability of the control. Subsequently, the parameters in the proposed course-keeping controller are optimized by utilizing Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), which can adaptively adjust the value of parameters in various scenarios, and thus further increase its efficiency. Finally, the improved controller is validated by carrying out simulation tests in various scenarios. The results show that it improves the course-keeping error and time-response specification by 4.19% and 9.71% on average, respectively, which can efficiently achieve the course-keeping of ships under various scenarios.