Economic MPC-based planning for marine vehicles: Tuning safety and energy efficiency

TL;DR

This paper introduces an online motion planning method for marine vehicles that balances safety and energy efficiency using economic model predictive control, demonstrated through experimental validation.

Contribution

It presents a novel EMPC-based planning approach that explicitly trades off safety and energy efficiency for marine vehicles in obstacle-rich environments.

Findings

Effective safety-energy trade-off achieved

Trajectory planning with safety margin as reference

Experimental validation confirms feasibility

Abstract

Energy efficiency and safety are two critical objectives for marine vehicles operating in environments with obstacles, and they generally conflict with each other. In this paper, we propose a novel online motion planning method of marine vehicles which can make trade-offs between the two design objectives based on the framework of economic model predictive control (EMPC). Firstly, the feasible trajectory with the most safety margin is designed and utilized as tracking reference. Secondly, the EMPC-based receding horizon motion planning algorithm is designed, in which the practical consumed energy and safety measure (i.e., the distance between the planning trajectory and the reference) are considered. Experimental results verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.