Autonomous COLREGs-Compliant Decision Making using Maritime Radar Tracking and Model Predictive Control

This paper addresses the challenges of making safe and predictable collision avoidance decisions considering uncertainties related to maritime radar tracking. When a maritime radar is used for autonomous collision avoidance, strategies for handling uncertain obstacle tracks, false tracks, and track loss become necessary. Robust decisions are needed in order to achieve clear and predictable actions according to the international regulations for preventing collisions at sea (COLREGs). We present robustness considerations and results of using an Integrated Probabilistic Data Association (IPDA) tracking method with a collision avoidance method based on Model Predictive Control. The results are from full-scale experiments that cover challenging multiple dynamic obstacle scenarios, including realistic vessel interactions where some obstacles obey COLREGs, while others do not.