Abstract
In order to make the underwater vehicle carry out the mission in a submarine environment, it is needed to plan a safe and efficient route to a given destination and prevent the autonomous submersible from colliding with obstacles while moving along the planned route. The function of collision avoidance makes the travel distance of the autonomous submersible longer. Moreover, it should move slowly near to obstacles against their moving disturbance. As a result, this invokes the degradation of the navigation efficiency in the process of collision avoidance. The side effect of the collision avoidance is not ignorable in the case of high congested environments such as the coast with many obstacles. In this paper, we suggest a path planning method which provides the route with minimum travel time considering collision avoidance in congested environment. For the purpose, we define environmental congestion map related to geometric information and obstacles. And we propose a method to consider the moving cost in the RRT scheme that provides the existing minimum distance path. We verified that the efficiency of our algorithm with simulation experiments.