GPS-less Coastal Navigation using Marine Radar for USV Operation

Abstract

Global Positioning System (GPS) is an important component for marine vehicle navigation. However, GPS may not be reliable or even available in some situations, since GPS signals can be easily blocked or reflected by large structures and they are susceptible to jamming and spoofing attacks. In fact, radar is one of the standard navigation instruments, and radar measurements can be utilized for vehicle localization by coastline matching into a prior map. In this paper, a radar-based localization via automatic map matching is proposed for unmanned surface vehicle (USV) navigation in a littoral area. A pulse radar is employed to collect surrounding coastline information, and relative position of the vehicle with respect to the pre-built map is estimated by coastline matching. Field experiments using a USV with an onboard radar in a real sea environment were performed to verify and demonstrate the performance of the proposed navigation approach.