The Autosea project: Developing closed-loop target tracking and collision avoidance systems

Abstract

Autonomous surface vehicles and maritime autonomous surface ships must rely on sense-and-avoid systems for navigating safely among other ships. The main objective of this paper is to present examples of such systems, and their verification in full-scale collision avoidance experiments as part of the research project "Sensor fusion and collision avoidance for autonomous surface vehicles" (Autosea). Lessons learned from the progression of experiments have led to increasing robustness of the methods, and provide a foundation for several important topics of further research in the near future.