Autonomous guidance, stepwise path planning, and path-following control with anti-collision for autonomous marine robots

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.