Wave-Aware Trajectory Planning for Unmanned Surface Vehicles Operating in Congested Environments

Many practical operations like search and rescue operations are time-sensitive missions. In this paper, we present a wave-aware deliberative planner that avoids collisions with traffic vessels and also opportunistically traverses wavefields generated by these vessels while minimizing the execution time and the risk of failure. The planner performs a search over a 4D pose-time lattice to generate a collision-free, minimum-risk sequence of motion goals. It addresses motion uncertainty, failure risk and perception uncertainty. We also present heuristics and adaptive motion goals to speed-up computation. We present simulation results showing that our wave-aware planner produces plans that execute faster compared to the typical reactive planning scheme. We also present results from physical experiments showing the feasibility of the proposed approach.