Unmanned Surface Vessels (USV) may interfere with ships in the same lane during navigation and may be affected by ships that actively collide or intercept the USV. Evidently, the latter poses a greater threat than the former. This paper proposes the concept of active and inactive interference. It is necessary for the USV to accurately classify the vessels’ intentions to conduct a suitable collision avoidance strategy. However, the existing research on collision avoidance of USV focuses on avoiding moving obstacles and rarely considers the interference intention of dynamic obstacles for USV when choosing collision avoidance strategies. This paper proposes an algorithm to recognize the interference intention of ships by combining visual classification with a Support Vector Machine (SVM). First, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed to distinguish the merchant ship from a high-performance ship that actively interferes with the USV with high probability. A high-dimensional feature dataset was designed to illustrate the navigation characteristics of an obstacle, and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was then employed to reduce the dimensionality of the dataset for obstacle classification. A modified SVM is presented to classify obstacles into active and inactive interference intention categories. Moreover, an escape algorithm based on an improved artificial potential field method is proposed for vessels with active interference. The simulation and experimental results clearly show that the USV can successfully identify the interference intention of obstacles and adopt a specific collision avoidance strategy for obstacles with active interference intentions. Using this algorithm, the USV can safely avoid obstacles with different interference intentions.@en

Dynamic collision avoidance between multiple vessels is a task full of challenges for unmanned surface vehicle (USV) movement, which has high requirements on real-time performance and safety. The difficulty of multi-obstacle collision avoidance is that it is hard to formulate the optimal obstacle avoidance strategy when encountering more than one obstacle threat at the same time; a good strategy to avoid one obstacle sometimes leads to threats from other obstacles. This paper presents a dynamic collision avoidance algorithm for USVs based on rolling obstacle classification and fuzzy rules. Firstly, potential collision probabilities between a USV and obstacles are calculated based on the time to the closest point of approach (TCPA). All obstacles are given different priorities based on potential collision probability, and the most urgent and secondary urgent ones will then be dynamically determined. Based on the velocity obstacle algorithm, four possible actions are defined to determine the basic domain in the collision avoidance strategy. After that, the Safety of Avoidance Strategy and Feasibility of Strategy Adjustment are calculated to determine the additional domain based on fuzzy rules. Fuzzy rules are used here to comprehensively consider the situation composed of multiple motion obstacles and the USV. Within the limited range of the basic domain and the additional domain, the optimal collision avoidance parameters of the USV can be calculated by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The PSO algorithm utilizes both the characteristic of pursuance for the population optimal and the characteristic of exploration for the individual optimal to avoid falling into the local optimal solution. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to certify the validity of the proposed method in complex traffic scenarios. The results illustrated that the proposed method could provide efficient collision avoidance actions.@en