Grounding-aware RRT* for Path Planning and Safe Navigation of Marine Crafts in Confined Waters
This addresses safe navigation for marine vessels in confined waters, but it is an incremental improvement over existing RRT* methods.
The paper tackles the problem of grounding risk during collision avoidance maneuvers for marine crafts in confined waters by developing a path planning algorithm based on RRT* that integrates water depth data and historical navigation patterns. The result is an optimal path deviation method that penalizes sailing in shallow waters, though no concrete performance numbers are provided.
The paper presents a path planning algorithm based on RRT* that addresses the risk of grounding during evasive manoeuvres to avoid collision. The planner achieves this objective by integrating a collective navigation experience with the systematic use of water depth information from the electronic navigational chart. Multivariate kernel density estimation is applied to historical AIS data to generate a probabilistic model describing seafarer's best practices while sailing in confined waters. This knowledge is then encoded into the RRT* cost function to penalize path deviations that would lead own ship to sail in shallow waters. Depth contours satisfying the own ship draught define the actual navigable area, and triangulation of this non-convex region is adopted to enable uniform sampling. This ensures the optimal path deviation.