Aspects of a reliable autonomous navigation and guidance system for an unmanned surface vehicle

This paper describes a novel navigation and guidance (NG) system designed to address the issue of receiving unreliable navigational data considering an unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). In the NG system, a confidence rate determination method has been designed to identify the uncertainty of the acquired data. According to the confidence rate, the risks from inaccurate data can be properly analysed facilitating the system generating a more reliable guidance route. The route is calculated using a newly developed algorithm named the constrained FM*. The new NG system has been verified in simulation environments with results proving the effectiveness and capabilities of the system.