A Reactive COLREGs-Compliant Navigation Strategy for Autonomous Maritime Navigation

This paper reports the development of an automatic collision avoidance technique for unmanned marine vessel incorporating standard collision regulations or COLREGs, defined by the International Maritime Organisation. Like any ship, all unmanned vessels must adhere to COLREGs at all times in order to minimise or eliminate the risk of collisions. The proposed approach is essentially a reactive path planning algorithm based on a modified well known Artificial Potential Fields (APF) framework. It is shown through simulations that the proposed strategy is able to generate COLREGs-compliant trajectories in the presence of both stationary and dynamic obstacles. Rules 13, 14 and 15 of the COLREGs, which apply to the overtaking, head-on and crossing scenarios respectively, are simulated for multiple dynamic vessels in an environment inclusive of land features.