A Coordination System between Decision Making and Controlling for Autonomous Collision Avoidance of Large Intelligent Ships

Abstract

Large ships are typically with large inertia and longtime delay in motion, in prevailing collision avoidance methods, their maneuverability is generally neglected, there could be a dangerous situation if the system fails to control the ship course as ordered in a timely manner. This paper proposes a coordination system which consists of two algorithms for avoiding risk and then returning to scheduled waypoint. The avoiding risk algorithm are based on VO (velocity obstacle) method, the returning algorithm is derived from LOS (light of sight) guidance. For better performance, the ship model for simulation is a nonlinear Norrbin Model, with the controller improved by CGSA (closed loop gain shaping algorithm) method from traditional PID control, COLREGS (Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea) constrains are considered. To test the effectiveness of the proposed system, a series of complex scenarios including Imazu problem are applied.

Keywords

• coordination system
• autonomous collision avoidance
• maneuverability
• autonomous ship