A path planning method for unmanned surface vehicles based on Riemannian geometry

An Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) is an autonomous marine unmanned vehicle. USV navigation control has been extensively studied as a key technology. However, for USVs in complex environments, there are many difficulties in modelling and controlling under the wind, wave, and current conditions. At present, path planning mainly focuses on the realization of obstacle avoidance function and the rapid generation of feasible paths. The main evaluation criteria depend on the calculation time and convergence of the algorithm, while the evaluation criteria of the optimal path itself and the selection of the optimal path are less involved. This paper does not use the existing path planning methods for USV. Instead, the environment is equivalently modeled in the Riemannian space, and the geodesic between two points on the surface is calculated. In this paper, two geodesic algorithms based on triangular mesh models are studied. By comparing the calculation accuracy and running time of the two, a more suitable path-planning method for the USV system is determined.