Maritime Unmanned Vehicle Cruise Path Planning for Maritime Information Collection*

:Maritime Unmanned Vehicle (MUV) as Unmanned Surface Vehicle is introduced as a novel traffic device for continuous maritime traffic information collection and complementing existing methods for Electronic Patrol System (EPS). MUV cruise path planning is studied regarding maximum sailing time, which is aiming at completing MUVs cruise task on a certain number of the areas with relatively high risk needed surveillance. With detailed description of MUV cruise path planning problem, it is Abstracted as travel salesman problem solved by ant colony algorithm in this paper. The approach used to select cruise objects is proposed, especially the cloud model applied to choose cruise navigation segments. The factors including total cruise distance and standard deviation of cruise time, and K-means clustering method are used to evaluate and handle the scenario with MUV navigation constraint. On the basis of above operations, the special scenario is finally converted into several ones without constraint. At last, the cases of Fuzhou Maritime Safety Administration areas are demonstrated. The results indicate that the method proposed for MUV cruise path planning is feasible and effective.