Path planning for the autonomous underwater vehicle

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel method to find the optimal path for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). AUVs have gained importance over the last few years as service and research tools in a variety of applications. Path planning is one of the challenging tasks when dynamic obstacles are encountered. The Dijkstra's algorithm is modified suitably to account for static as well as dynamic obstacles by adding an Additional Part (AP). In addition, the proposed algorithm takes into account the dynamics of the water flow and corrects the path suitably. Only two-dimensional routes are considered in the applications. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithm is effective in finding optimal paths. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.