Autonomous Decision-Making of Unmanned Surface Vehicle Operation with Multi-Source Sensing

As an automatic monitoring technique of the water environment, the unmanned surface vehicle (USV) should have the ability of autonomous decision-making to sense the complex environment and adjust the operation strategy. A status evaluation and operation decision-making method was proposed in this paper. Firstly, a general intelligent evaluation and decision-making mechanism was designed to organize the multi-source information. Secondly, the calculation methods of status evaluation and decision-making were proposed. Finally, an example was given based on the USV operation and environment data. The results show that the proposed method can effectively integrate the multi-source heterogeneous information and provide reliable support for the safe operation of USV.