A Two Layered Optimal Approach towards Cooperative Motion Planning of Unmanned Surface Vehicles in a Constrained Maritime Environment

AutoTuning Environment for Static Obstacle Avoidance Methods Applied to USVs

“…Therefore, these methods do not ensure that the vehicle reaches the target if there are local minima. For this reason, in order to provide a complete solution to the problem of autonomous navigation [1][2][3], it is necessary to combine obstacle avoidance methods or reactive methods [8,10,[12][13][14][15][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] with global or path planning algorithms [3,7,17,19,20]. In this sense, the obstacle scenarios studied in this work are focused only on the reactive part, unknown scenarios that the autonomous vehicle discovers while navigating.…”

“…where seg It is important to highlight that we have chosen to model each obstacle as a rectangle due to the facility for generating scenarios from these polygons. However, this LIDAR sensor model can also be used in the presence of irregular polygons such as the ones that define the marine environments [16,17,19]. For this purpose, two approaches can be taken.…”

“…Once the state of the vehicle is known, the detection system processes the information received by the surrounding sensors in order to generate a model of the environment in which the USV is located [6][7][8][9][10]. Using this model of the environment, the guidance system (composed by algorithms of: obstacle avoidance [8,[11][12][13][14][15][16], path following [4,5,17,18] and path planning [3,7,17,19,20]) demands the course and speed setpoints which guide the vessel safely to its goal. With the aim of ensuring that the vehicle reaches these setpoints, the control system commands the vessel's actuators (propulsion system and steering machine) [4,5].…”

“…And, although some of them also consider a specific approach to static obstacles [15,22,23,25], their study and evaluation is secondary. However, on a lesser scale, works such as [10,16,17,[29][30][31] are centered on the capacity of a USV to avoid static obstacles.…”

Autonomous Vessels: State of the Art and Potential Opportunities in Logistics

“…Inspired by LOS guidance control laws,Kim and Kim (2018) developed a leader-follower motion control of multiple autonomous ships under a stealth strategy for military purpose. Besides the leaderfollower structure, the virtual target approach is also a common choice for group control of multiple autonomous vessels Bibuli et al (2018). integrates a safety distance constrained A* approach with the virtual target approach to obtain the optimal trajectories for the USV fleet.…”