Real-Time Navigation for Autonomous Surface Vehicles In Ice-Covered Waters

Rodrigue de Schaetzen, Alexander Botros, Robert Gash, Kevin Murrant, Stephen L. Smith

Abstract:

Vessel transit in ice-covered waters poses unique
challenges in safe and efficient motion planning. When the
concentration of ice is high, it may not be possible to find
collision-free trajectories. Instead, ice can be pushed out of the
way if it is small or if contact occurs near the edge of the ice. In
this work, we propose a real-time navigation framework that
minimizes collisions with ice and distance travelled by the vessel.
We exploit a lattice-based planner with a cost that captures the
ship interaction with ice. To address the dynamic nature of the
environment, we plan motion in a receding horizon manner
based on updated vessel and ice state information. Further, we
present a novel planning heuristic for evaluating the cost-to-go,
which is applicable to navigation in a channel without a fixed
goal location. The performance of our planner is evaluated
across several levels of ice concentration both in simulated and
in real-world experiments.