Abstract: The current ship autonomous formation algorithm directly or indirectly specifies the specific position of each ship in the formation, so there are some problems that need to be solved, such as the large amount of communication, the inability to form up according to the proximity principle, and the inability to expand the number of ships. With the expansion of formation scale these problems will be more significant, so the research of new formation strategy is imperative. This study is inspired by the laws of nature and the graph theory and the artificial potential field method, proposing an autonomous formation method that does not need to specify the specific position of the ship in the formation and can automatically select the appropriate position according to the actual situation: the Virtual Wall Method, which solves the above problems. The effectiveness of this algorithm is verified by the simulation of static, dynamic, rotation, scaling and obstacle avoidance of ship formation, which has significant advantages in large-scale formation of ships.