A Multi-AUV Path Planning System Based on the Omni-Directional Sensing Ability

Following the development of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), multiple trajectory-based submarine target information collection constitutes one of the key technologies that significantly influence underwater information collection ability and deployment efficiency. In this paper, we propose an underwater information collection AUV, O-AUV, that can perceive the omnidirectional area and could detect a larger area than the traditional AUV. A 3D sensing model for the O-AUV is proposed to describe the complex underwater information collection spaces. Thereafter, a cube-based environment model involving candidate observation point calculation methods are suggested to adapt the O-AUV model. A voyage cost map is also built according to the multi-AUV path planning for a common submarine mission that must traverse numerous mission targets in complex environments through the R-Dijkstra algorithm. Specifically, the voyage planning problem is solved through a critical algorithm called ANSGA (accelerated NSGA-II algorithm), which in turn, is developed by modifying the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to accelerate the optimization rate for the Pareto solution. Experiments are carried out in MATLAB, and the results verify the validity of the proposed O-AUV+ANSGA algorithm framework.