Zhengyu Zhou

Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship (MASS) is promoted as the future of intelligent shipping. While autonomy technologies offer a solution for MASS, they have also resulted in new challenges for performance validation. To address this, a scenario-based validation method to test the autonomous collision avoidance system is proposed in this paper, including mining ship encounter scenarios from massive historical AIS data and randomly generated virtual test scenarios according to the parameter probability distributions from the collected real scenarios, as well as the final experiments: a total of 2900 generated scenarios including single ship and multi-ship encounter situations are created and applied to conduct testing experiments on the further assessment of our collision avoidance algorithm. The results indicate that the proposed method has the ability to quickly create appropriate testing scenarios according to AIS records, which are helpful to catch potential defects in a collision avoidance algorithm of MASS and to further analyze its navigating features. As a result, the research forms a systematic set of validation procedures from data gathering to practical experiments conduction, incorporating both the real statistics and the random generation method.

Large ships are typically with large inertia and longtime delay in motion, in prevailing collision avoidance methods, their maneuverability is generally neglected, there could be a dangerous situation if the system fails to control the ship course as ordered in a timely manner. This paper proposes a coordination system which consists of two algorithms for avoiding risk and then returning to scheduled waypoint. The avoiding risk algorithm are based on VO (velocity obstacle) method, the returning algorithm is derived from LOS (light of sight) guidance. For better performance, the ship model for simulation is a nonlinear Norrbin Model, with the controller improved by CGSA (closed loop gain shaping algorithm) method from traditional PID control, COLREGS (Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea) constrains are considered. To test the effectiveness of the proposed system, a series of complex scenarios including Imazu problem are applied.