COLREGs Compliant Cooperative Autonomy for Collision Avoidance

Due to ever increasing demands of humanity, transport through waterways has rapidly grown and inter-continental trades have become frequent in the recent years. An effect of this is the increased traffic in the waterways. And as a result, this has given rise to more frequent accidents and ship collision, which leads to a huge financial loss. Errors in human decision-making is a major cause of accidents in the maritime industry. Maritime accident investigations elaborate that around 80% of marine accidents are caused by human failure. Through autonomy occurrence of such events can be minimized. This is one of the major reasons why autonomy has been under consideration in the maritime frontier. For multiple ships traveling in the waters, the COLREGs has specified a certain set of rules to be followed meticulously to avoid any sort of accidents. In this project, we aim to study a way in which two ships that are in a collision course can avoid it by co-operatively interacting with each other.

The project aims to implement COLREGS rules in a situation where multiple vessels are in a collision course with each other. The first objective would be to formulate the path planning algorithm considering the static obstacles (for e.g. shore, beach, etc.) which generates a path that is collision free. The path planning algorithm must be chosen considering its effectiveness in the maritime environment. As single-screwed ships are under-actuated, the path generated must be dynamically feasible for the vessel to follow. Once the path is generated, any standard controller (for e.g. PID) can be implemented to perform path following of the vessel.

The next major task would be to solve the problem of dynamic obstacles (for e.g. other vessels) and generate a path which is collision free. In this case, another ship will be considered as a dynamic obstacle moving with a constant velocity. The goal would be to successfully avoid the other ship while at the same time conforming to the rules of the COLREGS. Later on, the co-operative aspect of the problem (i.e. multiple vessels communicating with each other) can be implemented.