Yuanqiao Wen

• PhD
• Professor at Wuhan University of Technology

Ensuring safety and preventing accidents in waterway channels are critical challenges for networked marine surface vessel systems (NMSVs). This study introduces a regulation-aware decision-making system designed to minimize traffic conflicts and enhance navigational safety in inland waterway traffic separation schemes. The proposed framework integr...

The effective design of a path-following controller for Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) under uncertain influences induced by various factors such as environmental disturbances is a challenging task. In this study, we propose to fulfill this task by taking benefits from an online parameter identification technique, the discrete-time sliding mode co...

This study explores the control framework for the trajectory tracking problem concerning unmanned surface vessels (USVs) in the presence of time-varying communication delays. To address the aforementioned problem, a novel networked predictive sliding mode control architecture is proposed by integrating a discrete sliding mode control technique and...

The development of advanced ship positioning and intelligent sensing technologies has transformed navigation at sea, moving beyond reliance on captains’ experience and standard routes. The trajectories traversed by ships at sea contain valuable data that can be mined to map maritime transportation networks and inform intelligent navigation systems....

Currently, Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) have become one of the most attractive research areas in shipping and academic communities. Based on the ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communication network, they can exploit diversified and distributed resources such as shore-based facilities and cloud computing centers to execute a variety of s...

This paper investigates the trajectory tracking control problem of unmanned surface vessel (USV) with time-varying communication delays by taking advantage of the discrete-time sliding mode control approach and networked predictive control strategy. To address the aforementioned problem, a novel networked predictive control scheme based on a discre...

Inland water transportation is regarded as a crucial component of global trade, yet its reliability has been increasingly challenged by uncertainties such as extreme weather, port congestion, and geopolitical tensions. Although substantial research has focused on the structural characteristics of inland water transportation networks, the dynamic re...

This Special Issue, entitled “Data/Knowledge-Driven Behaviour Analysis for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships—2nd Edition”, is the sequel to “Data/Knowledge-Driven Behaviour Analysis for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships”, including five contributions [...]

This paper designs a new control architecture for the formation tracking control problem of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). Firstly, a second-order maneuvering motion model for USVs is constructed, Secondly, combining the desired trajectory and speed with the state of the USV, a second-order error dynamic system and sliding mode surface are desig...

Simulation technology has been extensively utilized in the study of ship entry and exit from ports, as well as navigation through waterways. It effectively mirrors the stochastic dynamic changes and interrelationships among various elements within the port system. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of var...

The trajectory tracking control problem of under-actuated unmanned surface vessels (USVs) suffering from communication constraints (network delay, packet loss, packet disorder) as well as external environment disturbance is investigated in this paper. To solve the aforementioned trajectory control problem, a nonlinear networked predictive control s...

Trajectory planning is a fundamental function of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) and has attracted significant public attention. Unlike Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV), owing to their large inertia and limited navigability, finding an optimal and easy-to-track trajectory for MASS in restricted waters is challenging. Thus, an improved appro...

In urban areas situated along busy waterways like the Yangtze River, the diesel engines of inland navigation ships emerge as significant contributors to air pollution. Among these vessels, certain high-emission ships exhibit considerably higher levels of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions compared to others. To effectively identify such ships, this st...

The Internet of Ships (IoS), by integrating advanced technologies such as the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, aims to interconnect and communicate various physical devices related to maritime transportation, including ships, ports, traffic infrastructure, and warehouses. This integration is designed to optimize tra...

Vessels sailing in a single platoon could reduce resistance from the perspective of the whole platoon and the individual vessel, and contribute to improving energy benefits. Moreover, transportation energy costs and traffic efficiency are essential indicators for measuring waterborne transportation systems. We attempt to minimize transportation ene...

Semantic segmentation as one of the most popular scene perception techniques has been studied for autonomous vehicles. However, deep learning-based solutions rely on the volume and quality of data and knowledge from specific scene might not be incorporated. A novel knowledge-driven semantic segmentation method is proposed for waterway scene percept...

Trajectory planning is a fundamental function of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS), which has attracted numerous attention from the public. Due to huge inertia, limited navigable waters, and strong demands for computational efficiency, it is a challenge to find an optimal and feasible trajectory for MASS in restricted waters, such as inland...

This paper proposes a cooperative formation trajectory tracking control method to address the challenges of actuator saturation non-linearity and environmental disturbances in underactuated ship formation (USF) control in marine environments. First, The system is based on a leader-follower strategy, and designs a trajectory tracking guidance law fo...

This paper proposes a cooperative formation trajectory tracking control method to address the challenges of actuator saturation non-linearity and environmental disturbances in underactuated ship formation (USF) control in marine environments. First, The system is based on a leader-follower strategy, and designs a trajectory tracking guidance law fo...

This study contributes to addressing the challenge of quickly obtaining an effective and accurate nonparametric model for describing ship maneuvering motion in three degrees of freedom (3-DOF). To achieve this, an intelligent ship dynamics nonparametric modeling method named improved PER-DDPG is proposed. This method leverages the deep deterministi...

Maritime transport is intimately tied to the global economy and trade. Research on maritime transport risk is of great significance to prevent maritime accidents and enhance the safety of maritime transport. However, the development background and trend of risk assessment methods are not clear. Given the increasingly complex and variable transport...

Accurate fishing activity detection from the trajectories of fishing vessels can not only achieve high-precision fishery management but also ensure the reasonable and sustainable development of marine fishery resources. This paper proposes a new method to detect fishing vessels’ fishing activities based on the defined local dynamic parameters and g...

This Special Issue, “Data-/Knowledge-Driven Behavior Analysis of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships”, includes twelve contributions [...]

Waterline usually plays as an important visual cue for the autonomous navigation of marine unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) in specific waters. However, the visual complexity of the inland waterline presents a significant challenge for the development of highly efficient computer vision algorithms tailored for waterline detection in a complicated i...

With the development of emerging techniques, maritime autonomous surface ships (MASS) have attracted much attention, and the remote control ships’ future seems promising. However, due to communication issues, ship–shore transmission faces the challenge of time delay. The use of the transmitted information without compensation could reduce the effec...

The theoretical analysis of maritime accidents is a hot topic, but the time characteristics and dynamics of maritime accidents time series are still unclear. It is difficult to draw a clear conclusion from the cause analysis, so the accident is difficult to be predicted. To bridge this gap, this research analyzes the characteristics and evolution m...

The shipping industry is constantly expanding, and maritime traffic is increasing in numerous navigable waters. For maritime traffic safety, improving Situation Awareness (SA) is critical. However, the majority of relevant research placed a greater emphasis on the risk of a collision between two ships, but failed to capture the complexity of the gl...

Ship behavior is the semantic expression of corresponding trajectory in spatial-temporal space. The intelligent identification of ship behavior is critical for safety supervision in the waterborne transport. In particular, the complicated behavior reflects the long-term intentions of a ship, but it is challenging to recognize it automatically for c...

Identification of parameters involved in the linear response model with high precision is a highly cost-effective, as well as a challenging task, in developing a suitable model for the verification and validation (V+V) of some key techniques for autonomous vessels in the virtual testbed, e.g., guidance, navigation, and control (GNC). In order to de...

In order to address the problem that uncertain environments may cause uncertain disturbances to the motion planning of unmanned surface vehicles (USV) due to the effects of wind and current, we propose the theoretical trajectory model (TM) and the algorithm of the motion planning bound, which will provide the reachable areas for USV navigation by c...

To improve the ability of ship behavior detection in maritime safety surveillance, a new ship behavior of frequent turning within a certain spatial range, called ship loitering, was found under the ship behavior framework of "anchored-off, straight-sailing, turning". The concept of trajectory redundancy is defined as the quantitative representation...

With the continual development of modern transportation technology and artificial intelligence technology, how to recognize the complex phenomenon of ship behavior existing in maritime traffic has become a hot topic. Maritime traffic is a complex system, the emergence of ship behavior is a leading cause of traffic complexity, and make up the core i...

Aiming at an obstacle avoidance problem with dynamic constraints for Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), a method based on Circle Grid Trajectory Cell (CGTC) is proposed. Firstly, the ship model and standardization rules are constructed to develop and constrain the trajectory, respectively. Secondly, by analyzing the properties of the circle grid, the...

The occurrence of accidents such as personnel falling into water requires higher rescue capability of search and rescue equipment. Traditional search and rescue methods based on ships and speedboats are difficult to find because their speed and visual field limit them. With the development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, UAV is gradual...

In the field of automatic detection of ship exhaust behavior, a deep learning-based multi-sensor hierarchical detection method for tracking inland river ship chimneys is proposed to locate the ship exhaust behavior detection area quickly and accurately. Firstly, the primary detection uses a target detector based on a convolutional neural network to...

The remote monitoring method based on air-quality monitoring sensors is a common way to monitor the FSC (fuel sulfur content) of oils for ships. Considering the influences of geographical environments, atmospheric conditions, regional ship traffic flow, emission characteristics of ships, and height of monitoring sensors on the monitor station chose...

Shipping emissions have been considered a significant source of air pollution in the cities along the Yangtze River, with severe impacts on the climate and human health. This study created a complete annual ship emission inventory for the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and assessed its impact on air quality on a regional scale. To estimate the...

Due to the high error frequency of the existing methods in identifying a ship’s navigational intention, accidents frequently occur at intersections. Therefore, it is urgent to improve the ability to perceive ship intention at intersections. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on the fusion of image sequence and radar information to identif...

To simplify the micro-level CO2 (carbon dioxide) emission calculation model, reduce the dataset quality requirement of the model, and cut down the volume of calculation, a meso-level voyage-based emission model (MeVEM) for inland ships is proposed with their navigation characteristics considered. The navigation characteristics and the main influenc...

The traditional electronic-chart relied way of mining data on ship's port visiting is not reliable for inland waters, because the charts for those area is more likely incomplete or out of date. In contrary, abundant semantic information about geographic space is included in on-line maps which can supplement ship trajectory data with wide range of l...

Aiming at the problem that unmanned surface vehicle (USV) motion planning is disturbed by effects of wind and current, a USV motion planning method based on regularization-trajectory cells is proposed. First, a USV motion mathematical model is established while considering the influence of wind and current, and the motion trajectory is analyzed. Se...

Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) aims to improve the safety and efficiency of water transportation, yet its operation relies heavily on the work of Vessel Traffic Services Operators (VTSOs). Enhancing VTSO's situational awareness help improve VTS performance while relieving the workload of VTSOs. However, an effective method of analysing the water tra...

Aiming at an obstacle avoidance problem with dynamic constraints for Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), a method based on Circle Grid Trajectory Cell (CGTC) is proposed. Firstly, the ship model and standardization rules are constructed to develop and constrain the trajectory, respectively. Secondly, by analyzing the properties of the circle grid, the...

Formal expression of ship behavior is the basis for developing autonomous navigation systems, which supports the scene recognition, the intention inference, and the rule-compliant actions of the systems. The Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs) offers experience-based expressions of ship behavior fo...

The remote control is an important function of intelligent ships. In this paper, firstly, the functions and communication requirements of remote control ships are sorted out based on the “Rules for Intelligent Ships (2020)” issued by the China Classification Society. Secondly, a domain controller-based electronic and electrical architecture for inl...

Enhancing Situation Awareness (SA) is essential for the safety of marine traffic. Many indicators are developed to evaluate the status of the traffic and to facilitate SA of the Vessel Traffic Service Operators (VTSOs), such as collision risk, traffic complexity, etc. Many of these indicators are based on the pairwise encounters between ships, with...

Understanding, modeling, and predicting ship behavior are fundamental and essential issues for planning, controlling, and operating different levels of maritime autonomous surface ships (MASS). The maritime traffic data (e.g., radar data, AIS data, CCTV data) provide designers, officers on watch, and traffic operators with extensive information abo...

A method is proposed for remotely detecting sulfur content in fuel oil used by ships in emission control areas (ECAs) based on the direct collection of SO 2 emission data from the plume of the ship and numerical simulation models. Assuming a ship in the ECA uses fuel oil with compliance fuel sulfur content (FSC), activity-based ship emission assess...

A framework for risk assessment due to inland waterway transportation of dangerous goods is designed based on all possible event types that may be caused by the inland transportation of dangerous goods. The objective of this study is to design a framework for calculating the risks associated with changes in the transportation of dangerous goods alo...

Autonomy is the core capability of future systems, and architecture design is one of the critical issues in system development and implementation. To discuss the architecture of autonomous systems in the future, this paper reviews the developing progress of architectures from automation systems to autonomous systems. Firstly, the autonomy and auton...

In this study, a method for dynamically establishing ship domain in inland waters is proposed to help make decisions about ship collision avoidance. The surrounding waters of the target ship are divided to grids and then calculating the grid densities of ships in each moment to determine the shape and size of ship domain of different types of ships...

This study develops a system named Wuhan University of Technology Intelligent Tracer (WUT-iTracer) for identifying ships using high-fuel-sulfur-content (FSC) fuel oil in port waters. The system integrates a land-based sniffing monitoring module and a numerical simulation module. The land-based sniffing monitoring module collects and processes simul...

Monitoring the gas emission of maritime vessels is very challenging as the fields are almost inaccessible and the emission is very susceptible to the surrounding environment. In ultra-large-scale maritime scenes, mobile robots capable of gas detection and tracking will most likely fall into atmospheric turbulence. In this work, an enhanced tracking...

Ship emissions are the main contributor of air pollution in coastal ports. National governments introduced regulations for limiting ship exhaust emissions in port waters and reducing their effect on the environment. The effective measurement approaches of ship emission are the key to implement limitation policies effectively. The mainstream methods...

In this study, we propose a sampling method for calculating ship exhaust emission inventories, which reduces the uncertainties induced by missing ship static data in traditional methods. The stratified random sampling method is utilized to take sample ships based on the ship density, ship type, and main engine power. The exhaust emissions from samp...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of the seasonal flow field on inland ship emissions and to improve calculation accuracy. Firstly, the flow field model is built through numerical simulation to correct the sailing speed of the ship from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) information in real-time. Then, an optimal emission e...

Monitoring the gas emission of maritime vessels is very challenging as the fields are almost inaccessible and the dispersion is very susceptible to the surrounding environment. In ultra-large-scale maritime scenes, general emission detection and tracking frameworks based on infotaxis will most likely fall into local turbulence traps. In this work,...

This paper proposed a path following controller for the unmanned surface vessel (USV) by taking advantage of the vector field (VF) guidance method and the characteristic model-based heading angle and speed tracking approach. Considering the fact that the motions of USVs without professional design were difficult to be accurately modeled due to the...

The essence of the path planning problems is multi-modality constraint. However, most of the current literature has not mentioned this issue. This paper introduces the research progress of path planning based on the multi-modality constraint. The path planning of multi-modality constraint research can be classified into three stages in terms of its...

Recognition and understanding of ship mobility pattern have great significance for intelligent maritime applications, i.e. route discovery and anomaly detection. Besides a number of pattern discovery techniques currently derived from ship trajectory, topic modeling popular in the field of Natural Language Processing may provide a novel way to detec...

The lack of situational awareness is a major cause of ship collisions. Thus, enhancing the situational awareness of the stand-on ship is a key for navigational safety, where the intention estimation of the give-way ship is crucial. According to COLREGs, the stand-on ship is not allowed to take evasive actions until the give-way ship does not take p...

With the forced installation of the ship's automatic identification system (AIS), a large amount of ship trajectory data in the world is generated. These data provide information on latitude, longitude, speed and course, and plenty of materials for maritime pattern extraction and vessel behavior prediction. And how to dig into these AIS data deeply...

Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) have become increasingly interesting for the commercial maritime sectors as an alternative to conventional ships. For the purpose of development of MASS operations such as motion control (e.g. collision avoidance, trajectory tracking), the ship dynamic model is of significant importance for technique tests,...

The essence of the path planning problems is multi-modality constraint. However, most of the current literature has not mentioned this issue. This paper introduces the research progress of path planning based on the multi-modality constraint. The path planning of multi-modality constraint research can be classified into three stages in terms of its...

The maneuvering characteristics of the unmanned surface vehicle itself are very important to motion planning due to the limited water scale area. If the size, motion state, and maneuvering characteristics of the unmanned surface vehicle are not considered, the shortest path obtained is actually not feasible in the restricted waters. In this article...