OC-DWA: An Improved Dynamic Window Approach for USV Online Planning Considering Ocean Currents

In an oceanic environment, the dynamic window approach (DWA) is a widely used method for USV path planning. However, DWA neglects the impact of ocean currents on energy conservation. So we propose an improved DWA considering ocean currents (OC-DWA) for path planning in ocean current fields. Firstly, a view function is introduced to avoid being trapped by obstacles. Meanwhile, a novel evaluation function combined with ocean currents is introduced for conserving energy. Furthermore, an adaptive factor is utilized to maintain the balance between marching to the goal and following the currents. Finally, two kinds of ocean current environments are employed for comparison and results show that OC-DWA is superior to traditional DWA in various metrics.