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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Affairs and Policy
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1550529
This article is part of the Research Topic Emerging Computational Intelligence Techniques to Address Challenges in Oceanic Computing View all 3 articles

Collision Avoidance Method for Unmanned Ships by Using A Modified APF Algorithm

Provisionally accepted
Lianbo Li Lianbo Li 1*Wenhao Wu Wenhao Wu 2Zhengqian Li Zhengqian Li 1Fangjie Wang Fangjie Wang 1
  • 1 Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, China
  • 2 Shenzhen Maritime Safety Administration, Shenzhen, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This paper proposed a dynamic collision avoidance method based on Artificial Potential Field (APF) algorithm for unmanned ships, and improves the defects of traditional APF respectively: In order to make unmanned ships perform collision avoidance operation safely and comply with good seamanship and the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, 1972 (COLREGS), this paper proposes a ship domain priority judgment encounter situation, so that the algorithm can make collision avoidance operations compatible with the actual. For solving the path interference and target unreachable, a new attractive potential field function has been proposed, which divides the attractive potential field of the target point into multiple segments simultaneously.Meanwhile, the repulsive force on own ship is reduced when own ship is close to the target point, to avoid the path interference and overcome the problem of target unreachable. Finally, for the path oscillation problem, this paper refers to partial ideas of the Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) to integrate the potential field based on the traditional APF. By comparing with the traditional APF algorithm, the overall smoothing degree is improved by 71.8% comprehensively, and the effectiveness and superiority of the algorithm are verified.

    Keywords: unmanned ship, Artificial potential field algorithm, Dynamic window approach, distance decay factor, dynamic collision avoidance Article Highlights

    Received: 23 Dec 2024; Accepted: 27 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Li, Wu, Li and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Lianbo Li, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, China

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