A Study on Position Estimation and Path Planning Technology of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)

Abstract

In recent years, it is strongly required to utilize underwater robots for the management and investigation of various underwater artificial structures as the number of underwater artificial structures for the use of marine resources and military purposes has increased rapidly. For exploration of underwater structures using an underwater robot, navigation that estimates its own position and control creating and following a moving path are very important technologies.BR In this paper, we developed a position estimation algorithm that fusions DVL-aiding inertial navigation and a pose recognition in local area using active visible marker. We also implemented a path planning and following algorithm of underwater robot that adapted RRT (Rapidly-exploring Random Tree) and improved LOS (Line of Sight) method. As a result, in the actual marine environment experiment, the combined performance of position estimation and path tracking was measured, and the path following RMS error of the planned moving path was 0.53 m, which satisfied the target following error within 1 m.