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Talk-21: COLREGS Collision Avoidance for Autonomous Surface Vehicles with MOOS-IvP

Kyle Woerner, Michael Benjamin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

With a recent rise in the number of multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) running simultaneously in close proximity to one another and a growing interest in operating USVs in high contact density environments, a legitimate concern exists that USV collisions could become more frequent. In situations where USVs are not necessarily performing a collaborative mission but are using shared physical space such as multiple vehicles running on same river, a high demand exists for safe and efficient operation to minimize mission track deviations while preserving the safety and integrity of mission platforms. With no existing protocol for collision avoidance of USVs, much effort to date has focused on individual ad hoc collision avoidance approaches that are self-serving for their mission at hand, lack the uniformity of fleet-distributed protocols, and disregard the overall efficiency when scaled to being in a contact-dense environment. This research expects to show that by implementing a collision avoidance protocol (e.g., COLREGs for autonomous vehicles) both safety and efficiency will achieve significant gains. With a collision avoidance behavior and protocol across a fleet of USVs operating in the same geographic area, more time can be dedicated to actual mission execution of each vehicle with a significant reduction in the number of collisions that occur.

Categories:

  • Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs)
  • Collaborative Autonomy
  • COLREGS
  • MOOS-IvP
  • IvP Behaviors