Constrained Path-Planning Control of Unmanned Surface Vessels via Ant-Colony Optimization

This paper proposes a constrained path-planning scheme for the unmanned surface vessel (USV) via ant-colony optimization. First, a multi-grid map is modeled and established along the kinematics of the USV body suffered by limited energy. A typical ant-colony optimization algorithm is afterwards designed to achieve the energy-saving path planning for narrow channels of water areas. Finally, real lake experiments with HUSTER-12s USV are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed path-planning algorithm.