Cooperative path planning of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles operating in dynamic ocean environment

Abstract

This paper presents a two-stage cooperative path planner for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles operating in dynamic environment. In case of static environment, global Legendre pseudospectral method is employed for collision-free paths of vehicles for the purpose of minimum time consumption and simultaneous arrival. Moreover, in order to keep the multiple autonomous underwater vehicles safe from collisions on the path segments connecting two adjacent control nodes, an adaptive intermediate knots insertion algorithm is introduced. In the on-line planning stage, the local re-planning strategy aims at avoiding collisions with unexpected dynamic obstacles by two consecutive avoidance maneuvers, and the differential flatness property of autonomous underwater vehicle is utilized, which can help the vehicles react fast enough to avoid moving obstacles.