Impacts of GPS Spoofing on Path Planning of Unmanned Surface Ships

Abstract

The Artificial Potential Field (APF) method is a classical path planning method for unmanned ships, relying on Global Positioning System (GPS) positioning information for path planning. Unfortunately, once the path planning algorithm uses inaccurate or even fake data, it will lead to ship collision, grounding, or deviation from the course, causing severe economic losses and causing significant security risks to other sailing ships. This paper aims to study the impacts of GPS spoofing on the path planning of unmanned ships. We propose a GPS attack and study GPS spoofing of path planning based on the APF method for an unmanned ship by a low-cost software-defined radio, which causes the unmanned ship to deviate from the course. Our simulation tests show that this method has significant impacts on the path planning results of the APF method.