USV's automatic collision avoidance based on improved dynamic potential field method

Nowadays unmanned surface vessel (USV) automatic collision avoidance technology in a dynamic environment is getting increasingly concern in the intelligent navigation field. And taking USV's dynamic characteristics, COLREGs (International Regulations for Avoiding Collisions at sea), and the complexity of the marine environment into account is a trend of USV automatic collision avoidance technology. Based on the traditional potential field approach and COLREGs, this improved potential field model designed the collision avoidance algorithm integrated with rules, considered collision action timing, steering angle amplitude, and resume timing. More actually, the novel algorithm divided the collision avoidance process into three stages: track keeping, collision avoidance, and course resumption. At last, the simulation results show the feasibility and availability of collision avoidance.