Local Path Planning for Unmanned Surface Vehicles based on Hybrid A* and B-spline

Abstract

Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) have witnessed a vigorous growth in the past decades and have been applied in various applications in both commercial and military domains. Central to the control of USVs, local path planning is one of the crucial technologies in the process towards autonomy. This paper investigates the application of a novel path planning algorithm in combination with modified Hybrid A* and several path manipulators. First, the heuristic strategy and node expansion method of standard Hybrid A* have been adapted for the algorithm. Second, node cutting technique and B-spline path smoother are applied to enhance the path quality. Simulations have been carried out to illustrate the excellent performance of the proposed method comparing to several state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the new algorithm is tested in the USV model, and the results have demonstrated that it can perfectly coordinate with the USV control system. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can be considered as a reliable method dealing with local path planning problem for USV.