Obstacle-avoiding path planning for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles with simultaneous arrival

This paper focuses on planning the obstacle-avoiding paths of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in complex ocean environment, with the time coordination of simultaneous arrival. By imitating the nature phenomenon that river water avoids rocks and reaches the destination, the interfered fluid dynamical system (IFDS) is first presented to obtain the single-AUV path for obstacle avoidance, where the modulation matrix is calculated to quantify the influence of obstacles especially. Then the two-layer comprehensive adjustment to path length and voyage speed is utilized, aiming to achieve the simultaneous arrival at destination between multi-AUVs. By adjusting reactive parameters of IFDS, the former is to roughly ensure the intersection of AUVs’ potential arrival time range to be non-null. On this basis, the latter adjusts each AUV’s voyage speed finely using the consensus method with state predictor, which has faster convergence speed. If the multi-AUVs communication network is connected, the whole system will quickly converge to the consensus state, i.e., the estimated time of arrival (ETA) of each AUV tends to be equal. Finally, the simulation results verify the advantages of our proposed method.