Optimal Routing Strategies for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles in Time-Varying Environment
This work addresses path planning challenges for AUVs like the SLOCUM Glider, with potential applications to other autonomous systems, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing graph-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of finding time-optimal paths for autonomous underwater vehicles in time-varying ocean currents, presenting algorithms that consider factors like departure time and computational efficiency, though no concrete performance numbers are provided.
This paper presents a mission system and the therein implemented algorithms for path planning in a time-varying environment based on graph methods. The basic task of the introduced path planning algorithms is to find a time-optimal path from a defined start position to a goal position with consideration of the time-varying ocean current for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). Building on this, additional practice-oriented considerations in planning are discussed in this paper. Such points are the discussion of possible methods to accelerate the algorithms and the determination of the optimal departure time. The solutions and algorithms presented in this paper are focused on path planning requirements for the AUV ``SLOCUM Glider''. These algorithms are equally applicable to other AUVs or aerial mobile autonomous systems.