Research on local path planning of AUV under ocean environment

The complex movement of water, which exists almost everywhere in ocean environment, affects the movement of AUV and the effect of local path planning unavoidably. These kinds of effects are analysed in details and thus a solution based on fuzzy logic is presented in this paper. The key feature of the proposed approach is integrating the ability of sensor and characteristic of AUV platform. The result of planning is based on real-time assessment of environment which includes information of relationship of obstacle, ocean current and the robot. Because of too many variables involved in this assessment, the velocity of current is mapped into slow and fast fuzzy set. The former is ignored during obstacle avoiding, while the latter is subdivided into four analyzed states: obstacle and current on same side of robot, on different sides, robot with the current and against. This division greatly simplifies the fuzzy rule table, thus makes the method feasible. Simulation experiments show that this approach implements local path planning with high trustiness and efficiency.