Ship collision avoidance control based on improved velocity obstacle method

Abstract

The velocity obstacle method has extensive research in collision avoidance, which uses circles to represent robots or ships to find a collision-free velocity. To better describe the motion characteristics of ships, an improved velocity obstacle method based on elliptical ship domain is proposed in this paper. In the previous research on collision avoidance, the ship domains of the own ship and the target ship are seldom considered at the same time. This paper considers the ship domains of the own ship and the target ship at the same time and judges whether the ship domains of the two ships overlap based on the generalized characteristic polynomial. The heading angle is discretized to construct the velocity obstacle (VO) by calculating the collision velocity at different heading angles. Velocities on the boundaries of the velocity obstacle are used to find an optimal heading angle. The algorithm is tested in different encounter situations and successfully realizes collision avoidance.