Navigating high‐speed unmanned surface vehicles: System approach and validations

Abstract

With an increasing interest in the deployment of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) to support complex ocean operations, high-speed USVs (≥40 knots) have become an important option, especially in accomplishing demanding tasks such as coastal guarding. At present, there is a vast amount of studies focusing on the development of USVs' autonomous navigation systems, and the results of most of them have only been verified by simulations or demonstrations on low-speed experimental USVs (≤20 knots). It remains unclear how high-speed USVs would perform in real applications. In particular, when USVs are navigating at high-speed, reliable obstacle detections and robust motion control become increasingly difficult to achieve than in normal conditions. This paper therefore presents a new autonomous navigation system for high-speed USVs with the system software and hardware been designed on the basis for ensuring a safe and reliable operation. Within such a system, a collision avoidance algorithm based on velocity obstacle able to adjust the USV's heading and speed in real-time has been integrated. A local environment modelling method and a heading maintain method by considering Coast Guard International Regulations for Avoiding Collision at Sea are proposed to improve the reliability and stability of the system. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system has been verified and validated by hardware-in-the-loop simulation tests and sea trials on a high-speed USV ("Tianxing No. 1") in practical maritime environments. Results show that the autonomous navigation system adapts to the characteristics of highspeed USVs and can guide high-speed USVs (≥40 knots) in realising a safe autonomous navigation, which significantly improves the USV's autonomy level.

Field demonstration of advanced autonomous navigation technique for a fully unmanned surface vehicle in complex coastal traffic areas

“…The designated missions were patrol and surveillance to provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and to demonstrate cooperative surveillance. With the increasing demand for coastal guarding, a high‐speed USV platform has been developed and a set of field tests were conducted in open sea environments in China (Zhuang et al, 2021).…”

“…At the beginning of this autonomous era, an early model of a fullscale USV platform was tested in a real-sea environment (Elkins et al, 2010;Manley, 2008;Sutton et al, 2011). As a part of autonomous maritime navigation (AMN) project (Elkins et al, 2010) (Zhuang et al, 2021).…”

Anisotropic GPMP2: A Fast Continuous-Time Gaussian Processes Based Motion Planner for Unmanned Surface Vehicles in Environments With Ocean Currents

“…As summarised in our previous work on testing a USV in practical environments [48], to ensure a real-time performance, the minimum control signal updating (trajectory replanning) frequency for a high-speed (≥ 40 knots) USVs is 2 Hz. Based on this, we can also infer that the minimum frequency requirements for medium-speed (10 -40 knots) and lowspeed (≤ 10 knots) USVs should be more than 2 Hz.…”

Robust trajectory tracking control for unmanned surface vessels under motion constraints and environmental disturbances

“…https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9306-297X Enrico Anderlini https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8860-8330 Environment with large disturbance: For example, ocean with harsh weather Environment with small disturbance: For example, broad and smooth lake/river Complex trajectory with sharp velocity change: For example, reefs Low-speed USVs (410knots): For example, Springer 41 and Charlie 42 High/medium-speed USVs ( ø 10knots): For example, Tianxing No. 1 43 Large USVs with high power: For example, Fleet Class USVs 40…”