Intelligent Sailing Model for Open Sea Navigation

2025-01-09

AI Summary

A critical bottleneck in autonomous maritime systems is the lack of unified, realistic, and regulation-compliant open-sea simulation environments. Method: This paper introduces the first Intelligent Ship Maneuvering (ISM) dynamic model for high-seas navigation, proposing a novel rule-driven end-to-end maritime simulation paradigm that integrates a COLREGs-compliant rule engine, hierarchical waypoint generation, nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC), and a multi-agent interaction framework. It establishes the first scalable, verifiable benchmark for open-water interactive maritime traffic. Contribution/Results: Evaluated on 4,049 high-risk scenarios, ISM achieves zero collisions and a 97% task completion rate in pure-ISM settings. It supports real-time, regulation-consistent simulation across diverse vessel types and large-scale fleets. The work provides a new paradigm and foundational infrastructure for verifying navigation algorithms and assessing regulatory compliance of autonomous ships.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multi-Robot Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Agent-Based Simulation and Emergent Behavior
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Simulating Human Behavior

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

Autonomous vessels potentially enhance safety and reliability of seaborne trade. To facilitate the development of autonomous vessels, high-fidelity simulations are required to model realistic interactions with other vessels. However, modeling realistic interactive maritime traffic is challenging due to the unstructured environment, coarsely specified traffic rules, and largely varying vessel types. Currently, there is no standard for simulating interactive maritime environments in order to rigorously benchmark autonomous vessel algorithms. In this paper, we introduce the first intelligent sailing model (ISM), which simulates rule-compliant vessels for navigation on the open sea. An ISM vessel reacts to other traffic participants according to maritime traffic rules while at the same time solving a motion planning task characterized by waypoints. In particular, the ISM monitors the applicable rules, generates rule-compliant waypoints accordingly, and utilizes a model predictive control for tracking the waypoints. We evaluate the ISM in two environments: interactive traffic with only ISM vessels and mixed traffic where some vessel trajectories are from recorded real-world maritime traffic data or handcrafted for criticality. Our results show that simulations with many ISM vessels of different vessel types are rule-compliant and scalable. We tested 4,049 critical traffic scenarios. For interactive traffic with ISM vessels, no collisions occurred while goal-reaching rates of about 97 percent were achieved. We believe that our ISM can serve as a standard for challenging and realistic maritime traffic simulation to accelerate autonomous vessel development.

Problem

• Autonomous Ships
• Simulation Environment
• Navigation Testing

Innovation

• Intelligent Sailing Model
• Maritime Navigation Rules
• Complex Environment Path Planning