The invention relates to an intelligent control method based on adaptive planning of a virtual ship for an under-drive unmanned ship formation. The method comprises the following steps of 1, setting aformation and initializing parameters; 2, collecting a position coordinate (xL, yL) and a heading angle psiL of a leader ship, conducting wave filtering, and transmitting the position coordinate andthe heading angle to a following ship; 3, according to the formation, the position coordinate and the heading angle information of the leader ship, obtaining a reference position (xr, yr) and a reference motion posture psir of the following ship in the formation in real time; 4, introducing the virtual ship and conducting real-time adaptive planning to obtain a reference track of the following ship; 5, using a combination strategy of RBF neural networks and a minimum parameter learning algorithm to train learning parameters online to generate intelligent formation control signals, wherein theintelligent formation control signals include the rotating speed nF of a mainframe of the following ship and a rudder angle command signal deltaF. Compared with the prior art, the method has the advantages that the method adapts to curved path tasks, overhead is avoided, leader ship speed information is not needed, and the method is simple, convenient and excellent in real-time performance.