AUV Rendezvous Online Path Planning in a Highly Cluttered Undersea Environment Using Evolutionary Algorithms
This addresses path planning for AUVs in complex undersea settings, but it is incremental as it applies existing evolutionary methods to a specific scenario.
The study tackled the problem of planning an autonomous underwater vehicle's path to rendezvous with a leader in a cluttered, dynamic undersea environment by formulating it as a nonlinear optimal control problem and solving it using evolutionary algorithms like PSO, BBO, DE, and FA, with simulation results showing robustness and efficiency in handling obstacles and currents.
In this study, a single autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) aims to rendezvous with a submerged leader recovery vehicle through a cluttered and variable operating field. The rendezvous problem is transformed into a nonlinear optimal control problem (NOCP) and then numerical solutions are provided. A penalty function method is utilized to combine the boundary conditions, vehicular and environmental constraints with the performance index that is final rendezvous time.Four evolutionary based path planning methods namely particle swarm optimization (PSO), biogeography-based optimization (BBO), differential evolution (DE) and Firefly algorithm (FA) are employed to establish a reactive planner module and provide a numerical solution for the proposed NOCP. The objective is to synthesize and analysis the performance and capability of the mentioned methods for guiding an AUV from loitering point toward the rendezvous place through a comprehensive simulation study.The proposed planner module entails a heuristic for refining the path considering situational awareness of underlying environment, encompassing static and dynamic obstacles overwhelmed in spatiotemporal current vectors.This leads to accommodate the unforeseen changes in the operating field like emergence of unpredicted obstacles or variability of current vector filed and turbulent regions. The simulation results demonstrate the inherent robustness and significant efficiency of the proposed planner in enhancement of the vehicle's autonomy in terms of using current force, coping undesired current disturbance for the desired rendezvous purpose. Advantages and shortcoming of all utilized methods are also presented based on the obtained results.