Abstract This paper concerns with the method of parameters tuning and the capability of active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) to the nonlinear plants. Firstly, an adaptive method of ADRC parameters based on Q-learning is proposed. Besides, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed parameter tuning strategy, the novel method is applied to the ship course control which has multifarious uncertainties due to the disturbance of wind, waves and currents. And then, for better control performance, when the training of Q value-table, the states stochastic initialize of each episode is not equiprobability, different state has different weights. The simulation results of both adaptive ADRC and linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) show that the proposed algorithm has the advantages of robustness and higher tracking precision.