Experimental results on obstacle avoidance for high speed unmanned surface vehicles

This work presents the first experimental results of the real-time motion planner developed within an on-going research project between DIBRIS, University of Genova and Selex-ES, Italy, one of the leading players for providing large systems aimed at security and surveillance. The ultimate goal of the research project is the development of a complete solution for managing and supervising a team of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), operating in a (semi-)autonomous manner within a civilian harbour. The proposed obstacle avoidance algorithm exploits the kinematic information of the vessels operating in the harbour in order to compute the optimal path to reach the target position, while at the same time avoiding any moving obstacle. The paper recalls the fundamentals of the proposed approach, introduces the developed USV prototypes and finally presents the adaptation of the motion planner for its use on the real tests. Field trials are presented to show the effectiveness of the approach even at high speeds.