A Jamming Aware Artificial Potential Field Method to Counter GPS Jamming for Unmanned Surface Ship Path Planning

Global positioning system (GPS) plays an important role in the path planning of unmanned surface ships. As we know, the civil GPS signal is not encrypted, and its structure is open. Meanwhile, the power strength of GPS signals arriving at receivers is weak. All of these make GPS vulnerable to jamming. GPS jamming attacks adversely affect the accuracy of the received GPS signals, thus affecting the path planning results of unmanned surface ships and even causing collisions. This article presents a jamming aware artificial potential field (JA-APF) method. The JA-APF method first determines whether GPS jamming exists in unmanned surface ships' surrounding environment by detecting the receivers' received signal strength and calculating the packet error rate. Then, the JA-APF method calculates the position range of the jamming source. Finally, the JA-APF method replans the path according to the resultant force of the attraction around the goal, the repulsion around obstacles, and the repulsion around multiple GPS jammers. Through the simulation, we determine the value of the repulsive potential factor of the jammer to optimize the path planning results of the JA-APF method and analyze the influence of the jamming power on the path planning results. The simulation results show that the JA-APF method can effectively solve the impact of GPS jamming on the results in the path planning process and recover as soon as possible.