Ship Real-time Route Planning Based on Field Theory and Dynamic Window Approach

There are two main problems to be solved in ship real-time route planning. The first problem is how to model the environment of the navigation area, and the second question is how to obtain the optimal action in the current state. In this paper, the dynamic window approach (DWA) is combined with field theory to search the current optimal shipping route. Firstly, the field theory is used to model all obstacles in the environment, which not only considers the size of obstacles, but also highlights the influence of the speed of dynamic obstacles on the path planning. Secondly, the dynamic window method is used to set the search space according to the speed that the ship can achieve in the future period of time to form a dynamic window. Multiple groups of trajectories are generated in the dynamic window, and then evaluated to obtain the optimal trajectory. The simulation results show that the proposed route planning method is effective.