Persistent AUV Operations Using a Robust Reactive Mission and Path Planning (RRMPP) Architecture

Providing a higher level of decision autonomy is a true challenge in development of today AUVs and promotes a single vehicle to accomplish multiple tasks in a single mission as well as accompanying prompt changes of a turbulent and highly uncertain environment, which has not been completely attained yet. The proceeding approach builds on recent researches toward constructing a comprehensive structure for AUV mission planning, routing, tasktime managing and synchronic online motion planning adaptive to sudden changes of the time variant environment. Respectively, an “Autonomous Reactive Mission Scheduling and Path Planning” (ARMSP) architecture is constructed in this paper and a bunch of evolutionary algorithms are employed by different layers of the proposed control architecture to investigate the efficiency of the structure toward handling addressed objectives and prove stability of its performance in real-time mission task-time-threat management regardless of the applied metaheuristic algorithm. Static current map data, uncertain dynamic-static obstacles, vehicles Kino-dynamic constraints are taken into account and online path re-planning strategy is adopted to consider local variations of the environment so that a small computational load is devoted for re-planning procedure since the upper layer, which is responsible for mission scheduling, renders an overview of the operation area that AUV should fly thru. Numerical simulations for analysis of different situations of the real-world environment is accomplished separately for each layer and also for the entire ARMSP model at the end. Performance and stability of the model is investigated thorough employing metaheuristic algorithms toward furnishing the stated mission goals. It is proven by analyzing the simulation results that the proposed model provides a perfect mission timing and task managing while guarantying a secure deployment during the mission. KeywordsAutonomous control architecture, task ordering-organizing, underwater mission planning, reactive decision making, online path planning, evolutionary computing