Trajectory planning for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles with safety guarantees

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Hamilton-Jacobi differential game and model predictive control-based method for planning safe trajectories for multiple AUVs in challenging wave conditions, ensuring obstacle avoidance and collision prevention.

Contribution

It presents a novel safety-guaranteed trajectory planning approach for multiple AUVs considering wave disturbances and vehicle shapes, using Hamilton-Jacobi differential games and nonlinear collision constraints.

Findings

Effective trajectory planning under wave disturbances.

Guarantees collision avoidance and safety.

Handles complex vehicle shapes and dynamic environments.

Abstract

This paper addresses the trajectory planning for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in strong waves that can disturb the AUVs' trajectory tracking ability and cause obstacle and inter-vehicle collisions. A novel approach based on Hamilton-Jacobi differential game formulation and model predictive control is proposed to generate safety-guaranteed trajectories for AUV systems considering wave disturbance that is either time-varying state-independent or time-varying state-dependent. This approach plans safety-guaranteed trajectories for multiple AUVs and considers the shapes of AUVs, where nonlinear smooth collision avoidance constraints are obtained via strong duality.