Optimizing Multi-Vessel Collision Avoidance Decision Making for Autonomous Surface Vessels: A COLREGs-Compliant Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Automatic collision avoidance decision making for vessels is a critical challenge in the development of autonomous ships and has become a central point of research in the maritime safety domain. Effective and systematic collision avoidance strategies significantly reduce the risk of vessel collisions, ensuring safe navigation. This study develops a multi-vessel automatic collision avoidance decision-making method based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and establishes a vessel behavior decision model. When designing the reward function for continuous action spaces, the criteria of the “Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea” (COLREGs) were adhered to, taking into account the vessel’s collision risk under various encounter situations, real-world navigation practices, and navigational complexities. Furthermore, to enable the algorithm to precisely differentiate between collision avoidance and the navigation resumption phase in varied vessel encounter situations, this paper incorporated “collision avoidance decision making” and “course recovery decision making” as state parameters in the state set design, from which the respective objective functions were defined. To further enhance the algorithm’s performance, techniques such as behavior cloning, residual networks, and CPU-GPU dual-core parallel processing modules were integrated. Through simulation experiments in the enhanced Imazu training environment, the practicality of the method, taking into account the effects of wind and ocean currents, was corroborated. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can perform effective collision avoidance decision making in a range of vessel encounter situations, indicating its efficiency and robust generalization capabilities.