Efficient Reacquisition Path Planning For Multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

The purpose of this research is to develop a computationally efficient path-planning algorithm for waypoint reacquisition by multiple autonomous underwater vehicles. This algorithm is specifically designed for the underwater environment where vehicles typically have dissimilar starting and ending locations. This constraint is different from the standard vehicle routing problem and significantly restricts the size of the solution space that must be explored to generate an efficient solution. The proposed algorithm consists of three phases: waypoint assignment, route optimization, and route validation. There is no feedback between any of the phases, which allows the bulk of the computation to be distributed among the vehicles further reducing the computational burden. In the first phase, an efficient heuristic technique is employed that exploits the spatial separation of the vehicle starting and ending positions. Afterwards, the route optimization and route validation phases are processed independently by each vehicle on their respectively assigned waypoints. This results in a computationally efficient algorithm that produces quality solutions, and its proficiency is verified by simulations.