An improved path planning method for ships considering motion characteristics

With the development of the new generation of information technology, the traditional ship field is increasingly integrated with artificial intelligence, big data, communication and navigation technologies. It is obvious that the Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) is currently in focus world-wide and the research on this topic is growing. However, the fully autonomous operation of MASS still faces many challenges of key technologies, such as target detection, path planning, collision avoidance, etc., among which path planning has become one of the most critical problems. In this paper, a novel path planning method for ships, named Sector-AStar (S-AStar), is proposed. Taking the characteristics of ship motion into consideration, this method improves the search strategy based on the ship heading angle. It can be seen from the simulation results that the proposed Sector-AStar method can effectively shorten the decision time and increase the safety of ship navigation. Moreover, the path turning angle and the path tracking deviation of Sector-AStar are both smaller than AStar, which is more conducive to ship motion control.