Surveillance-Band Artificial Potential Field Guidance for USV Standoff Surveillance Under Loss of External Supervisory Communication

Maritime surveillance by unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) can be degraded by external supervisory communication loss. This study formulated communication-denied maritime surveillance using a USV as a surveillance-band regulation problem, assuming that onboard navigation and relative target-position estimation remain available, and developed a surveillance-band artificial potential field (SB-APF) guidance scheme. The proposed scheme combines band-boundary restoration, desired-distance alignment, danger-zone escape, tangential surveillance, navigational-hazard avoidance, and safe-reference bias within a mode-switching structure for reacquisition (recovery into the surveillance band), maintenance, and escape-and-return. The SB-APF was evaluated against six baseline policies under 18 conditions using Monte Carlo replications with matched seeds; pairwise differences were examined using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with Holm correction, effect sizes, and confidence intervals. Compared with Fast Lyapunov vector-field guidance (Fast-LVFG) with nf=60, SB-APF maintained comparable surveillance maintenance and similar first-escape timing and reduced the mean reacquisition time by approximately 39 s, whereas Fast-LVFG provided more precise desired-distance regulation. Switching stabilization and a localized hazard-normal correction reduced hazard-region entry from 7.74% to 0.56% of the hazard-present runs relative to the configuration with neither mechanism, although residual entries and mission-level costs remained. These findings suggest that surveillance-band regulation provides a viable mission-oriented guidance structure within the tested guidance-level simulation conditions.