Three-Dimensional Path Planning for AUV Based on Interfered Fluid Dynamical System Under Ocean Current (June 2018)

This paper focuses on planning a three-dimensional (3-D) path for the autonomous underwater vehicle in ocean environment with complicated static and dynamic obstacles as well as the ocean current. Imitating the principle of natural flow avoiding rocks, we develop a submerged path planning method based on improved interfered fluid dynamical system (IIFDS). In view of the particular feature of ocean environment, the obstacles and ocean current are modeled first. The flow field weight coefficient is then proposed to add the current into the confluence of IIFDS, so that the planned path could make use of the current. In order to obtain the energy-optimal path, the improved genetic algorithm whose mutation operator is modified by grey wolf optimizer is proposed to optimize the repulsive and tangential reaction coefficient, tangential direction coefficient, and flow field weight coefficient. Furthermore, a reverse-avoidance strategy is applied to real-time path planning to avoid dynamic obstacles, combined with IIFDS. Finally, the good performance of our proposed method is verified by simulations in various scenarios.