COLREGs-Compliant Collision-Free Cooperative Path Following for Multiple Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships

This paper is concerned with the collision-free cooperative path following (CPF) of networked underactuated maritime autonomous surface ships (MASSs), which are required to follow the Convention on the International Regulations for Pre-venting Collisions at Sea (COLREGs). Three primary COLREGS rules are considered in this paper: crossing, overtaking, and head-on situations. Firstly, a finite state machine is proposed based on the COLREGS to ascertain the encounter types between the own ship and the obstacle ship. Secondly, a switching heading decision is made by combining the Line-of-sight guidance and the constant avoidance angle method. Thirdly, cooperative guidance laws of desired velocities are developed to achieve both the CPF task and the COLREGs-compliant collision avoidance task. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed COLREGs-compliant collision-free CPF method for multiple MASSs is validated by a simulation example.