With the continuous development of high and new technologies such as computer, communication, sensor and artificial intelligence, intelligent and unmanned ships have gradually become the inevitable trend of present and future ship development. In the global competition, the shipbuilding industry is in a new era of intelligence and unmanned, which is also an important way to promote the supply-side structural reform of the shipbuilding industry and the transformation of old and new growth drivers. In recent years, with the continuous penetration of artificial intelligence technology into the ship industry, intelligent ship has gradually become the future development trend, and has gradually realized the transformation from “Man-Ship” system to “Internet of Things + Intelligent ship”. The development of intelligent ship cannot be separated from intelligent navigation, which is a crucial core function. As two key technologies of intelligent navigation, path planning and tracking control are of great significance to their research. In the form of an overview, this paper firstly explains the navigation basis of intelligent ship. The navigation task of intelligent ship is divided into four parts. After that, the development background, design principle, advantages and disadvantages of various algorithms of path planning and tracking control and the improvement points of traditional algorithms are discussed. Finally, some suggestions for the future development direction are put forward according to the research in current methods and algorithms.