Unmanned aerial surveillance system for hazard collision avoidance in autonomous shipping

Autonomous ships require a sense-and-collision-avoidance functionality based on surveillance of the ocean surface in order to detect unmapped and potentially non-cooperative obstacles and hazards, and to engage into evasive manoeuvres to avoid impending collisions. In this paper, we study the concept of using an autonomous ship being assisted by an unmanned aerial surveillance system (UASS) that provides information to the ship in order to implement collision avoidance in compliance with the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS). The motivation is that a UASS provides complementary sensing capabilities that can be combined with a conventional maritime radar and Automatic Identification System (AIS) to detect smaller obstacles that may be hidden in clutter, behind other objects, or submerged close to the surface. We propose a system architecture and implement a simulation environment to illustrate the concept and study the feasibility of the key control algorithms based on receding-horizon optimization.