An intelligent navigation system for AUVs using fuzzy relational products

The paper describes a heuristic search technique carrying out collision avoidance for autonomous underwater vehicles(AUVs). Fuzzy relational products are used as the mathematical implement for the analysis and synthesis of relations between obstacles that are met in the navigation environment and available candidate nodes. The authors propose a more effective evaluation function that reflects the heuristic information of domain experts on obstacle clearance, and an advanced heuristic search method performing collision avoidance for AUVs. The search technique adopts fuzzy relational products to conduct path-planning of an intelligent navigation system. In order to verify the performance of the proposed heuristic search, it is compared with the A* search method through a simulation in view of the CPU time, the optimization of the path and the amount of memory usage.