Min-Max Path Planning Algorithms for Heterogeneous, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are used in several maritime applications ranging from commercial to military use. In these applications, multiple AUVs are generally deployed from either a single base station or multiple base stations. AUVs constrained with time and resource rely on path planning algorithms to carry out the monitoring tasks efficiently. Given a set of targets and vehicles, this work addresses the problem of visiting each target at least once by a vehicle such that the minimum of the maximum distance traveled by any vehicle is minimized. Three insertion based heuristics are developed to solve the path planning problem. The performance of all the proposed heuristics are presented for 20 instances of the problem. The output solutions for one instance is also simulated in Neptus, an open source underwater mission planner.