EMPMR berthing scheme: A novel event-triggered motion planning and motion replanning scheme for unmanned surface vessels

Abstract

In this study, the issues related to approaching and berthing of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) are investigated. The automatic berthing task is divided into motion planning and motion replanning. First, a smooth path from the initial position to the berth is planned using A* algorithm and B-spline. Then, the segmented interpolation method is employed to let the USV velocities converge slowly to zero at the berth, and an initial berthing trajectory is obtained. Moreover, considering the kinetic constraints of the USV, the nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) algorithm is employed in the offline motion planning and online motion replanning scheme. In this scheme, novel static, and COLREGs-based dynamic obstacle avoidance functions are proposed based on Gaussian functions. Furthermore, the event-triggered mechanism is adopted to improve the real-time performance of the NMPC algorithm. The proposed event-triggered motion planning and motion replanning (EMPMR) scheme and Han et al.’s scheme are tested in six scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed EMPMR scheme can accomplish USV’s approaching and automatic berthing of USVs and has better obstacle avoidance and computational performance.