A review of global path planning algorithms for planar navigation of autonomous underwater robots

Abstract

Path planning is one of the most important navigation schemes of any autonomous robot. The time complexity of the algorithm and the length of the path generated determine the quality of the algorithm. Hence it is necessary to select a proper algorithm for better path planning of a robot. This chapter provides a survey of the global path planning methods for Autonomous Underwater Robots (AUR). The algorithms are developed in C++ language and the generated paths are shown using MATLAB environment. In order to analyze the efficiency of the algorithm for global path planning various mazes and conditions are considered. The time complexity by means of the number of clock cycles taken for the completion of the program execution is calculated for each algorithm. The various algorithms and the simulations results are presented in detail.