This paper presents research on a complete, closed-loop environmental perception strategy at the system level and on standardized sea trial verification methods for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) in typical maritime mission scenarios. Existing research on USV perception mostly focuses on optimizing discrete functional algorithms, such as object detection and tracking, with verification performed only in specific scenarios. These works generally lack task-matched perception schemes covering the full operation cycle and corresponding standardized, reproducible verification systems, making them difficult to adapt to the full-cycle execution requirements of real, complex maritime tasks. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a systematic environmental perception strategy for typical USV operation tasks, establishes a complete workflow from object detection to obstacle avoidance perception and decision-making, and designs two sets of standardized sea trial schemes for core tasks. These schemes provide unified specifications and an evaluation benchmark for verifying the real-world performance of USV environmental perception systems. Finally, full-cycle sea trials on a real ship are completed, and the test results verify the engineering practicability of the proposed perception strategy, as well as the reproducibility, standardization, and extensibility of the established test system, with the laser positioning hit rate improved by 82% and 54% under green-water and foggy conditions compared with the conventional miss distance-based method.

This paper is dedicated to solving the environmental perception system problem of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) experiencing adverse sea conditions and complex mission scenarios. First, the functionalities and characteristics of each subsystem in the USV environmental perception system under different mission scenarios are analyzed, and an efficient and stable environmental perception system is designed. Second, the static and dynamic characteristics of the sea–sky line are investigated, along with the impacts on each subsystem of the environmental perception system when the USV experiences six-degree-of-freedom motion on the sea surface. Based on the above analysis, a sea–sky line detection method based on the radar–electro-optical system is designed. This method utilizes the features of the radar and electro-optical subsystems to redefine the region of interest, effectively suppressing interference from non-sea–sky line edges, thereby improving detection efficiency and accuracy. Furthermore, a sea–sky line-based target detection algorithm is proposed, which confines the search area to the vicinity of the detected sea–sky line, significantly reducing false detections caused by sea clutter and noise. Sea trials demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the accuracy and real-time performance of USV environmental perception. The proposed systematic approach offers a practical solution for improving the robustness of USV environmental perception in complex marine environments. Sea trials have shown that the method improves the effectiveness of target information by 3.61%.