Collision Avoidance Strategies for Unmanned Surface Vehicles Based on Probabilistic Game Theory Framework

When sailing on cluttered water, effective collision avoidance is an essential safety requirement for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). So that it can avoid multiple random ships effectively. This paper proposes a collision avoidance strategy for USVs based on the probabilistic game theory framework. First, a probability model is established combined with the USV’s kinematics for the collision avoidance problem. Then a greedy algorithm is designed under the framework of probability. It uses a cost function that searches possible movement paths to determine avoidance strategies for the USV. Compared with other collision avoidance methods, the method in this paper seeks to minimize the collision probability instead of guaranteeing no collision, because it is very difficult or impossible to completely avoid the collision in practice. Based on this, our method copes with kinematic constraints of the USV. The effectiveness of the algorithm is verified by simulation, and the simulation results show that the collision avoidance strategy proposed in this paper achieves a very good collision avoidance performance.