Hovering Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Trajectory Planning in Complex Environments

Abstract

In this paper, we present trajectory planning method for Hovering Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (HAUV), based on Extended Kalman-Filter (EKF) process. Our planner is based on Rapid Random Trees (RRT) concept, generating visibility motion primitives in 3D underwater environments with obstacle avoidance capability. As far as we know, we present for the first time HAUV planner with visibility analysis for different kind of applications such as hull inspection where visibility analysis can be very crucial.