WRSC/IRSC 2015: Robotic Sailing 2015 pp 77-87 | Cite as
AIS-Enabled Collision Avoidance Strategies for Autonomous Sailboats
Abstract
Autonomous sailing boats are a valuable resource for ocean monitoring, sampling and surveillance due to their intrinsic very low energy requirements and extreme capability for long term navigation. However, the extended presence in the ocean is vulnerable to a multitude of hazards that may compromise the success of a mission. Although the conventional manned sea crafts must comply to the international rules of the road (or COLREGS), unmanned (small and slow) robotic boats should actively anticipate close encounters with (large and fast) ships that in practical situations may not be able to avoid collisions with small vessels. This paper proposes a set of simple rules for implementing a defensive and conservative collision avoidance strategy for autonomous sailing boats, based solely on the AIS data received from large ships.
Keywords
Collision Avoidance Automatic Identification System Large Ship Narrow Corridor Single ShipNotes
Acknowledgments
This work is financed by the ERDF—European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project “FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-037281”.
The authors are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable suggestions to improve the final version of the manuscript.
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