Non-Isotropic Planar Motion Planning for Sailboat Navigation

Abstract: The purpose of the thesis was to explore the possibilities of using a Level-Set method to design a time-optimal path planar of a subject to direction-dependent maximum velocities. A promising application for such a planning approach lies in sailboat navigation planning, because of the dynamic ocean waves, current, wind and the characteristics of a sailboat. In the thesis, we developed an IOS application to simulate such scenario as environment properties with wind, static obstacles and the sailboat mapped into direction-dependent velocities in different locations of the environment.  Considering the wind is the main power for the sailboat, a wind speed generation function was created, based on different locations. The Level-Set method is widely used in image processing because of its various advantages, for instance, the ability to deal with topology change and stability. It also can be applied in path planning, in which the process of the Level-Set method can be considered as a continuous wave front propagating with a speed from the start location. A grid-based map was used to represent the environment. While the wave front was crossing the cell on the grid, a time was recorded for every cell, following the negative gradient direction of such crossing time, and then an optimal path could be found. In addition, we used the Narrow Band method to speed up the calculation of processing the level set equation. Finally, this report gives the results of the experiments of static obstacle avoidance, wind effects and smooth path planning.