Long-Range Route-planning for Autonomous Vehicles in the Polar Oceans
This work addresses the need for more sustainable and extended autonomous operations in polar regions for marine research or exploration, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing route-planning methods for a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of automating long-range route-planning for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in the Southern Ocean to address high carbon costs and operational limitations from human piloting, and it demonstrated that efficient, ice-avoiding, long-distance traverses can be planned.
There is an increasing demand for piloted autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to operate in polar ice conditions. At present, AUVs are deployed from ships and directly human-piloted in these regions, entailing a high carbon cost and limiting the scope of operations. A key requirement for long-term autonomous missions is a long-range route planning capability that is aware of the changing ice conditions. In this paper we address the problem of automating long-range route-planning for AUVs operating in the Southern Ocean. We present the route-planning method and results showing that efficient, ice-avoiding, long-distance traverses can be planned.