Cooperative path planning for multi-AUV in time-varying ocean flows

For low-speed underwater vehicles, the ocean currents has a great influence on them, and the changes in ocean currents is complex and continuous, thus whose impact must be taken into consideration in the path planning. There are still lack of authoritative indicator and method for the cooperating path planning. The calculation of the voyage time is a difficult problem in the time-varying ocean, for the existing methods of the cooperating path planning, the computation time will increase exponentially as the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) counts increase, rendering them unfeasible. A collaborative path planning method is presehted for multi-AUV under the influence of time-varying ocean currents based on the dynamic programming algorithm. Each AUV cooperates with the one who has the longest estimated time of sailing, enabling the arrays of AUV to get their common goal in the shortest time with minimum time-difference. At the same time, they could avoid the obstacles along the way to the target. Simulation results show that the proposed method has a promising applicability.