Autonomous Collision Avoidance of Unmanned Surface Vehicles Based on Improved A-Star and Dynamic Window Approach Algorithms

Unmanned surface vessel (USV) autonomous navigation on the open sea involving real-time path planning and collision avoidance is still one of the essential problems to ensure the USV’s safe and efficient navigation. Especially in a congested and uncertain marine traffic environment, not only will static obstacles be taken into account but other target vessels in motion should also be considered. Also, the general requirement of the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs) should be satisfied. Hence, an improved A-star algorithm for USV path planning and improved dynamic window approach (IDWA) for collision avoidance were proposed. First, considering the requirement of COLREGs, the velocity search space was filtered again, and the quantity of USV trajectories was reduced. Then, the improved A-star algorithm was introduced to let the USV avoid static obstacles and reach its destination without trapping in local optimization. Moreover the Deep Q-network method was utilized to train weight coefficients of the IDWA objective function. Thereby, the improved algorithm-generated path during the process of collision avoidance was more reasonable and safer. To verify feasibility of the proposed path-planning algorithm, a comparison experiment with the traditional DWA method was carried out. The results showed that whether it was for a single USV to a single target or for multiple USVs to multiple targets, path planning, the proposed method, could work effectively to avoid obstacles safely and reach the destination quickly. The improved algorithm will be expected to provide a reference for USV path planning and collision avoidance as well as contribute to the implementation of autonomous ship navigation.