A review of path planning algorithms in maritime autonomous surface ships: Navigation safety perspective

Unmanned maritime systems are evolving in a rapidly changing environment. Although the regulation and international law processes are still in progress, there are numerous research attempts regarding autonomous maritime vehicle path planning particularly. In contrast to ground and air autonomous path planning, ship path planning has numerous pitfalls such as safety, complexity and environmental dynamics that hinder the emergence of reliable autonomous systems. This review explores the path planning algorithms of autonomous maritime vehicles and their collision regulation relevance in order to reveal how the research community handles this issue. Our relevant findings point out that there are still many traffic rules to be dealt by path planning algorithms. Algorithms that can be calibrated in terms of safe distance, safe speed and etc. may be deemed more compliant after regulation amendments.