The drawbacks of common nonlinear Filtered- ε adaptive inverse control (AIC) method, such as the unreliability due to the change of delay time and the faultiness existing in its disturbance control loop, are discussed. Based on it, the diagram of AIC is amended to accommodate with the characteristic of nonlinear object with time delay. The corresponding Filtered- ε adaptive algorithm based on RTRL is presented to identify the parameters and design the controller. The simulation results on a nonlinear ship model of "The R.O.V Zeefakkel" show that compared with the previous scheme and adaptive PID control, the improved method not only keeps the same dynamic response performance, but also owns higher robustness and disturbance rejection ability, and it is suitable for the control of nonlinear objects which have higher requirement to the maneuverability under complex disturbance environment.