Path Planning and Navigation of Oceanic Autonomous Sailboats and Vessels: A Survey

Oceanic autonomous surface vehicles(ASVs) are one kind of autonomous marine robots that have advantages of energy saving and is flexible to use. Nowadays, ASVs are playing an important role in marine science, maritime industry, and national defense. It could improve the efficiency of oceanic data collection, ensure marine transportation safety, and protect national security. One of the core challenges for ASVs is how to plan a safe navigation autonomously under the complicated ocean environment. Based on the type of marine vehicles, ASVs could be divided into two categories: autonomous sailboats and autonomous vessels. In this article, we review the challenges and related solutions of ASVs' autonomous navigation, including modeling analysis, path planning and implementation. Finally, we make a summary of all of those in four tables and discuss about the future research directions.