Perimeter patrol on autonomous surface vehicles using marine radar

Perimeter patrol enhances the utility of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) by enabling many security and scientific missions, including harbor protection, water sampling, and geological survey. We present a novel approach to perimeter patrol that uses only two sensors: commercial off-the-shelf available marine radar and the heading information from a GPS. Our algorithm performs computer vision morphological operations on the radar image to find a suitable path around shore and choose an appropriate next waypoint. Our method has proved robust to a variety of field conditions, allowing us to demonstrate the autonomous navigation of a 3.5 km perimeter lake.