An automatic route planning service for unmanned surface vehicles

The Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) has developed an autonomous unmanned surface vehicle (USV), Odin, which is tasked with performing surveys and mine countermeasures missions. It is meant to navigate autonomously close to shore, and must do so in a safe manner. To do so, it requires safe and efficient routes that it can follow, and thus needs a service to provide it with such routes. In this report, we present an automatic route planning service which provides routes that are suited for route following by the Odin USV. The service is implemented in a common framework for route planning based on open source tools and open standards. The same framework is also used for route planning for other platforms at FFI. Route planning requests are made through a web interface which implements the WPS (Web processing service) standard, which makes the service easy to integrate in a variety of applications. The planning service uses a graph based route planning method, where a graph structure is created offline based on S-57 Electronic Navigation Charts. This graph is then used for a graph-search resulting in a coarse route. This route is further refined with post processing to obtain a route suitable for direct path following by an USV. The route planner has been used in live testing for Odin, and it has been demonstrated that the route planner is capable of providing suitable routes for littoral operations for an USV.