360-Degree Visual Detection and Target Tracking on an Autonomous Surface Vehicle

Operation of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) poses a number of challenges, including vehicle survivability for long-duration missions in hazardous and possibly hostile environments, loss of communication and/or localization due to environmental or tactical situations, reacting intelligently and quickly to highly dynamic conditions, re-planning to recover from faults while continuing with operations, and extracting the maximum amount of information from onboard and offboard sensors for situational awareness. Coupled with these issues is the need to conduct missions in areas with other possible adversarial vessels, including the protection of high-value fixed assets such as oil platforms, anchored ships, and port facilities.