Path Planning for Marine Vehicles using Bézier Curves

Over the past few years maritime sector has witnessed an increasing interest in use of autonomous ships and in particular Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASV) in complex applications with high associated risks. There is an uprising interest in the development of advanced path planning algorithms for marine vehicles in congested waterways. Availability of an efficient path planning technique that considers the dynamic capabilities of the vehicle is of paramount importance in the implementation of these algorithms. This article reports an early work which aims to contribute to the development of a new generation of path planning that incorporates in its formulation the dynamics of the vehicles and extra data made available by on board sensors about obstacles and other vehicles in vicinity. To this end, Bezier Curves are exploited as the basis for generating a rich set of paths. Then, differential flatness property of the vehicle is used to assign a cost function to each path that reflects the dynamic capabilities of the vehicle on that path. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is shown by help of numerical simulations.