Cooperative Maneuvering of Unmanned Ships for Collision Avoidance at Sea

Abstract

The article investigates the problem of collision avoidance of a group of ships offshore. To solve this problem it is necessary to ensure the cooperative maneuvering of several vessels from the group. The article looks into the case of unmanned ships, when each vessel is operated automatically. The use of unmanned technologies can eliminate the human factor on the safety of navigation. For this, it is necessary to develop reliable ship control algorithms in automatic mode.The publication proposes an algorithm for solving this problem. To this end, from the total amount of vessels in a given area we distinguish between the subsets of dangerous ships, privileged vessels, vessels obliged to maneuver, and ships that restrict the scope of solution. A method for constructing these subsets is described. A subset of dangerous ships is constructed by pair wise assessing the danger of rapprochement of each vessel with the rest of the vessels from the group. For this, it is necessary to synthesize forecasts of the trajectories of all vessels in the water area. A risk scale and an algorithm for estimate the collision of ships are proposed. A number of dangerously moving ships are divided into two subsets: privileged vessels and vessels obliged to maneuver. A safe divergence must be ensured by maneuvering these vessels. The remaining vessels in the water area are restrictions when seeking a solution. In the case where no solution can be found, a procedure to reduce the restrictions by moving ships from one set to another and re-searching for solutions is proposed. The final answer can be a set of changed routes for vessels obliged to maneuver.To carry out cooperative action is necessary to ensure the exchange of information between the automatic agents. This topic is also touched upon in the article. For citation:Smolentsev, Sergey V., Anatolii E. Sazonov, and Yurii M. Iskanderov. "Cooperative maneuvering of unmanned ships for collision avoidance at sea." Vestnik Gosudarstvennogo universiteta morskogo i rechnogo flota imeni admirala S. O.

Monitoring of the process of safe divergence on the part of an unmanned vessel

“…In the works of the author [10,11], the issues of solving the problem of safe divergence and cooperative maneuvering of unmanned vessels controlled by automatic agents are also considered.…”