Strategic path planning method for intervention AUVs in a complex environment

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have come to play an essential role in marine applications. While AUVs have been used to some extent for monitoring, however, interventions have mainly remained unexploited. We develop an intervention method for low-cost AUVs, which are smaller and cheaper than conventional AUVs, but with lower hardware performance. The method can decide on actions strategically tailored to the characteristics of the mission. In this paper, we propose a new path planning method tailored to the characteristics of the mission in a complex environment for intervention AUVs. The performance of the method was verified by simulations using a 3D model of the real environment.