Advances in Autonomous Obstacle Avoidance for Unmanned Surface Vehicles

Abstract

The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego has been involved in the continuing development of obstacle avoidance for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) towards the aim of a high level of autonomous navigation. An autonomous USV can fulfill a variety of missions and applications that are of increasing interest for the US Navy and other Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security organizations. The USV obstacle avoidance package is being developed first by accurately creating a world model based on various sensors such as vision, radar, and nautical charts. Then, with this world model the USV can avoid obstacles with the use of a far-field deliberative obstacle avoidance component and a near-field reactive obstacle avoidance component. This paper addresses the advances made in USV obstacle avoidance during the last two years.

COLREGs-based collision avoidance strategies for unmanned surface vehicles

“…The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego (SSC San Diego) have developed an ODA system which provides optimal trajectories based on the COLREGs. The distance to the object is measured using an onboard camera system mounted on a SEADOO Challenger 2000 sport boat [12,13]. Another collision avoidance method using fuzzy logic with reference to COLREGs is devised for vessel traffic service (VTS) [10], however, no experimental results have been reported.…”

An experimental setup for autonomous operation of surface vessels in rough seas

“…The camera was calibrated since its images were distorted. Hence, a matrix of 37 × 57 LEDs was designed and installed on the surface of the pool such that 2.44 ± 0.023 α 1 1.51 ± 0.0075 m 22 1.64 ± 0.12 d 2 13.0 ± 0.30 α 2 1.75 ± 0.013 m 33 0.03 ± 0.0068 d 3 0.0564 ± 0.00085 α 3 1.59 ± 0.0285 the distance between two consecutive LEDs along both the length and the width of the pool was 8.25 cm. An image was then captured, and the LED locations on the image matrix were filtered.…”

Local reactive obstacle avoidance approach for high-speed unmanned surface vehicle

“…Furthermore, such navigation system is mainly determined by obstacle avoidance during navigation. Aiming at the obstacle avoidance of USVs, the hierarchical strategy-based obstacle avoidance approaches have been proposed for USVs; these approaches are composed of global path planning and the local reactive obstacle avoidance algorithm (Larson et al, 2007(Larson et al, , 2006Krishnamurthy et al, 2008;Casalino et al, 2009). Some researchers proposed a navigation rule for the motion obstacle avoidance of USVs in accordance with the Coast Guard Collision Regulations, and the navigation rule was verified by USV kayaks in a real water environment (Benjamin et al, 2006).…”

“…Furthermore, the results in Naeem et al (2012) were verified only by simulation merely. Larson et al (2007Larson et al ( , 2006, Bandyophadyay et al (2009) and Krishnamurthy et al (2008)) used behaviorbased reactive obstacle avoidance approaches to deal with local obstacle avoidance for USVs. Larson et al (2007Larson et al ( , 2006 used the Morphin algorithm (Simmons et al, 1998) which was proposed by Carnegie Mellon University, to deal with the local static obstacle avoidance of USVs.…”