Obstacle Avoiding Path Planning Pipeline for Marine Surface Vessels
Inês Soares, Sara Sa, João Morais, João Fortuna · 2022
In the context of mobile robots, path planning is crucial to prevent collisions with obstacles. Moreover, with Unmanned Surface Vehicles, collision can be devastating, possibly resulting in a hull breach. To mitigate this problem, we developed a path planning module for our mission command and control software. To simplify further integration of other features and improvements, we devised this plugin as a pipeline of smaller modules. The user creates automated planning requests on the mission control interface, an API receives and forwards them to the path planing pipeline, and then returns the obstacle avoiding path. To validate the concept, we implemented popular algorithms like A* search, Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree, and Fast Marching Square as alternative and configurable modules. This implementation is suitable for field usage, and is fully integrated into our mission control system.