A Rudimentary Mission Planning System for Marine Autonomous Surface Ships

Maritime autonomous surface ships (MASS) have become a topic of intensive research in academia and industry, with focus areas such as path following and tracking, low-level control, collision avoidance, situational awareness, and others. However, high-level mission planning has received less attention in the literature, although it constitutes an important aspect of autonomy. This paper takes a step towards closing this gap by developing a basic mission planning system, which can generate a feasible and efficient sequence of high-level actions (plans) that are subsequently executed by the control system. The mission planner is based on the Graphplan algorithm, and considers actions related to, for example, entering docking mode, visiting a specific location, or starting (un)loading of containers, which are then to be executed by appropriate control systems. In addition, we couple the mission planner with the ship's guidance, navigation and control system, which has path planning, path following and fuzzy logic-based collision avoidance capabilities. To assess the performance of the proposed method, we present a set of simulations of a MASS navigating in a realistic marine environment including static obstacles and other ships.