Path Planning of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle in Swimming Pool Under Communication Constraints

Abstract

Path planning is an essential process of optimising the trajectories and achieving the desired mission objective efficiently. It has various applications such as search and rescue (SAR), underwater mapping and exploration, military and defence. Path planning of AUV is a serious concern, whenever a stationary obstacle is present in a real time environment. The successful deployment of an AUV in an assigned path encompasses different activities such as surveillance operations and monitoring the environment in presence of obstacles. In this study, the Dijkstra’s algorithm has been proposed for solving the problem of path planning. Dijkstra’s algorithm is a popular method of finding the nearest distance between the way-point along the desired path. It is often used in applications such as robotics, network routing, and transportation. The research mainly contributes in applying the Dijkstra’s algorithm in resolving the path planning problem in presence of obstacles along with obtaining the shortest path. The work is carried out in MATLAB. The subsequent path is obtained in real-time and accordingly the outcomes of the simulation and the proposed method can resolve the issue of planning a path in a real time underwater environment.