Radar-based maritime path planning with static obstacles in a Frenet frame

Abstract

<p indent=0mm>Navigation safety at sea is important for autonomous surface vehicles, and involves the problems of motion planning in dynamic environments and their robust tracking through feedback control. We present a practical path planning method that generates smooth trajectories for a high-speed marine vehicle traveling in an unknown environment, where obstacles are detected in real time by marine radar. Our approach uses the polynomial curve to describe lateral and longitudinal trajectories in the Frenet frame, known as motion primitives, whose combination ensures that the planning area is properly covered. In addition, we can select a feasible, optimal, and collision-free trajectory from such a set of motion primitives that is generated by considering the vehicle dynamics and comfort. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated in an experiment with static and dynamic obstacles.