Parallel trajectory planning for shipborne Autonomous collision avoidance system

Abstract Collision at sea is always a significant issue affecting the safety of ship navigation. The shipborne autonomous collision avoidance system (SACAS) has the great advantage to minimize collision accidents in ship navigation. A parallel trajectory planning architecture is proposed in this paper for SACAS system. The fully-coupled deliberative planner based on the modified RRT algorithm is developed to search for optimal global trajectory in a low re-planning frequency. The fully-coupled reactive planner based on the modified DW algorithm is developed to generate the optimal local trajectory in a high re-planning frequency to counteract the unexpected behavior of dynamic obstacles in the vicinity of the vessel. The obstacle constraints, ship maneuvering constraints, COLREGs rules, trajectory optimality, and real-time requirements are satisfied simultaneously in both global and local planning to ensure the collision-free optimal navigation in compliance with COLREGs rules. The on-water tests of a trimaran model equipped with a model-scale SACAS system are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm. The good balance between the computational efficiency and trajectory optimality is achieved in parallel trajectory planning.