A Sailor's Journey into Autonomous Navigation

TL;DR: I spent the last few weeks building an autonomous vessel navigation system from scratch using Python. Started with basic pathfinding (A*), added realistic ship physics, implemented collision detection and avoidance following COLREGs principles, and got it working with multiple moving vessels. It’s messy, it’s imperfect, but it works. This is Phase 1 - the classical approach. Next up: machine learning. Here’s everything I learned, the bugs I battled, and why this matters for maritime’s future.