The fusion-based Path Planning for Near Seabed Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have played a huge role in deep-sea operations and exploration. However, with the limited energy, AUV faces obstacles in complex underwater environments such as seamounts and trenches during near bottom operations. Therefore, planning the reasonable and efficient path is one of the important conditions for AUV to achieve underwater operations
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. A new path planning method that combines improved RRT strategy and dynamic window analysis (DWA) is proposed to address the impact of underwater hydrodynamic forces and complex underwater environments on AUV during near bottom navigation. This proposed path planner has the following two advantages: one is to improve the global planning performance compared with the traditional RRT algorithm, and the other is to guarantee the real-time local planning capability via the DWA method. The superior performance of the developed planning algorithm is verified in the numerical examples.