COLREGs-compliant Planning Architecture For Autonomous Surface Vehicles

This paper presents a three-level planning architecture designed to enforce different international maritime rules (COLREGs), enhancing navigation safety and autonomy. The architecture consists of a global path planning layer for static obstacle avoidance, a local path planning layer incorporating dynamic obstacle data and COLREGs rules, and a reactive obstacle avoidance layer that addresses unexpected encounters in real-time. Preliminary tests at sea were conducted on the proposed approach, demonstrating its ability to achieve rules compliant behaviour.