A ship guidance problem is normally discussed in the framework of nonlinear control. In this paper, we formulate this problem as a linear control problem by introducing a visual sensor to the guidance system. First we propose a new framework for the ship guidance problem. In this framework, the ship guidance system consists of a visual sensor and a linear controller. Then we discuss the detail of the visual sensor and the design of the linear controller. Finally we demonstrate the performance of the proposed guidance system in experiments.
