Study On Autonomous Sailboat Obstacle Avoidance System

Marine environmental monitoring is of great significance to the sustainable development of the marine economy.Autonomous sailboats that have been developed in recent years have many advantages such as high mobility,large monitoring range,and environmental protection,and have good application prospects.In this paper,autonomous sailboat obstacle avoidance system will be studied.The autonomous sailing system includes perception module,planning module and control module.Environmental perception module digitizes information such as obstacles and wind fields through the sensors.Planning module plans sailing routes based on the environmental information.And control module controls the sailing ship to navigate the established route according to the planning information.The three modules,perception,planning and control,were studied in this paper.At the perceptual level,monocular cameras combined with the TLD(Tracking-Learning-Detection)framework enable the identification of simple obstacles and provide real-time direction information of obstacles.At the planning level,the autonomous sailboat obstacle avoidance algorithm based on A* is given by comprehensively considering the obstacle information,sailing characteristics and wind field information,and the sailing planning route can be given in real time.Based on the planned path,a pathfollowing control algorithm based on Line of Sight(LOS)is given at the control level to control the rudder angle in real time to maintain the track.Finally,in this paper,the real-boat test of the perception module is carried out.The results show that the obstacle detection algorithm based on the monocular camera can give the obstacle direction in real time.The path planning algorithm and the path-following algorithm are simulated and tested on a real sailboat.The path planning algorithm can well plan the obstacle avoidance path suitable for sailing,and the path following algorithm can effectively and moderately control the sailboat sailing around the established path.