Task allocation and online path planning for AUV swarm cooperation

Abstract

An increasingly important of military field and ocean survey is a swarm of AUV working in cooperation in an underwater which can minimizing physical risk to humans and cost. During long range operating task, how to maximum the cooperation efficiency of AUV swarm, to reduce the energy consumption, and to ensure the operating safety, all these are important for AUV community cooperation. This paper presents several contributions toward the research of task allocation for AUV swarm cooperation and online path planning for their safe operations. The task allocation model is represented by a five-element set. The task coding method, pheromone lists and pheromone update method in ant colony (ACO) algorithm are improved to be applied to multi-AUVs tasks assignment model. Based on the fan-shaped model of the forward-looking sonar, an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to redefine the fitness function to avoid obstacles. Lastly, to illustrate the appropriateness of the proposed approach, simulation results are given in this paper.