Motion Planning for Marine Vehicles with Rigid-Body Dynamics: A Balance for Economic Performance and Desired Trajectories

The paper studies the motion planning problem for marine vehicles in which both the power consumption of vehicles and the guiding effects of the desired trajectory are taken into account. An energy-saving cost with physical meaning is developed to pursue more economical maneuvering. And a tracking cost related with desired collision-free trajectories is designed to enable marine vehicles to pass through the areas we are interested in. By choosing the two costs as optimization objectives, we construct an optimization problem which obey the practical constraints, such as dynamics of marine vehicles, limitations of actuators, and the conditions of obstacle avoidance, terminal sates and arrival time. In addition, the procedure for the proposed motion planning scheme is organized into an algorithm. Finally, through comparative simulations, the effectiveness of the designed planning algorithm is verified and the tradeoff between economic and guiding performance is demonstrated.