Abstract
This thesis presents methods for autonomous guidance, stepwise path planning, and path-following control
with anti-collision and COLREGs compliance. The system is validated through simulations.
Two waypoint generation methods are developed, i.e., the navigation function method and the stream
function method. These two methods are modified to achieve COLREGs compliance. The navigation
function method guarantees global convergence. While the stream function method gives shorter and
smoother path.
Each waypoint generation method can be integrated with a path generation algorithm. The path generation
algorithm formulates a quadratic programming problem to minimize path length between two
waypoints. A controller is designed using backstepping and a thrust allocation algorithm is implemented
to perform path following.
