Temporal mission planning for autonomous ships: Design and integration with guidance, navigation and control
Peer reviewed, Journal article
Accepted version
Permanent lenke
https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3133227Utgivelsesdato
2024Metadata
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Sammendrag
Mission planning constitutes an important feature of autonomy for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS). Nevertheless, this research topic remains largely unexplored, as the majority of academic and industry projects primarily focus on developing low-level systems, such as control, collision avoidance, and situational awareness. The main contribution of this paper is to address this problem by developing a high-level decision-making system capable of generating an efficient and feasible temporal sequence of high-level actions, which is then sent to the ship control systems responsible for execution. The mission planner is based on the simultaneous temporal planner (STP), which in our case considers temporal actions related to, for example, moving to a specific location, activating docking mode or starting the process of container (un)loading, which are then executed by their respective control systems. Contrary to classical artificial intelligence (AI) planning algorithms, Temporal AI planning algorithms, such as STP, can consider duration of actions, which allows more realistic representation of the mission. We connect the high-level mission planner with the ship’s guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system, which has path-planning, path-following control and fuzzy logic-based collision avoidance capabilities. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated through a series of simulations of a MASS operating in a realistic marine environment including other ships and static obstacles.