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Path Planning and Navigation of Oceanic Autonomous Sailboats and Vessels: A Survey

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Abstract

Oceanic autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) are one kind of autonomous marine robots that have advantages of energy saving and is flexible to use. Nowadays, ASVs are playing an important role in marine science, maritime industry, and national defense. It could improve the efficiency of oceanic data collection, ensure marine transportation safety, and protect national security. One of the core challenges for ASVs is how to plan a safe navigation autonomously under the complicated ocean environment. Based on the type of marine vehicles, ASVs could be divided into two categories: autonomous sailboats and autonomous vessels. In this article, we review the challenges and related solutions of ASVs’ autonomous navigation, including modeling analysis, path planning and implementation. Finally, we make a summary of all of those in four tables and discuss about the future research directions.

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Acknowledgements

The study is supported by the work of Chao Liu and Zhongwen Guo, which is partially supported by the National Key R&D Program (No. 2016YFC1401900), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2017M620 293), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 201713016), Qingdao National Labor for Marine Science and Technology Open Research Project (No. QNLM2016ORP0405), and the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong (No. ZR2018BF006). The work of Yu Wang is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61572347) and by the U.S. Department of Transportation Center for Advanced Multimodal Mobility Solutions and Education (No. 69A3351747133).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Fundamentals, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, 266100, China

    Wei Jing

  2. College of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, 266100, China

    Chao Liu, Lintao Xian, Xi Wang, Zhongwen Guo, Gumede Brenda & Kelvin Wachi Tendai

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, 28233, USA

    Wei Jing, Ting Li & A. B. M. Mohaimenur Rahman

  4. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19122, USA

    Yu Wang

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  1. Wei Jing
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Correspondence to Chao Liu.

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Jing, W., Liu, C., Li, T. et al. Path Planning and Navigation of Oceanic Autonomous Sailboats and Vessels: A Survey. J. Ocean Univ. China 19, 609–621 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11802-020-4144-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11802-020-4144-7

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