A collision avoidance system based on self-organizing map and its application to an underwater vehicle

Underwater vehicles are expected as the attractive tools for the operation in the extreme environment such as the deep ocean survey. In order to realize the useful and practical robots, which can work in the ocean, underwater vehicles should take their action by judging the changing condition from their own sensors and actuators, and are desirable to make their behavior with limited efforts of the operators, because of features caused by the working environment. Therefore, the mobile robot should be autonomous and adaptive to their environment. Development of the path planning system, which can navigate the vehicle without the collision to the obstacles, is one of the most important problems in order to realize the autonomous underwater vehicles. In this paper, Self-Organizing Map (SOM) proposed by Kohonen is applied to the navigation, which takes the distances to the surroundings as inputs, and outputs the direction for the robot to proceed. The efficiency of path planning system is investigated through the simulation and experiments with an underwater vehicle "Twin-Burger".