Line of Sight Guidance with Intelligent Obstacle Avoidance for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Intelligent obstacle avoidance is combined with line of sight (LOS) guidance for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in this paper. Through incorporating expert knowledge and experience, a fuzzy logic planner is utilized to generate steering commands for an AUV to avoid obstacles lying between two adjacent waypoints along the prescribed track lines. Although the AUV will be able to avoid the obstacle through the fuzzy logic planner, undesirable energy consumption due to overshoot is possible during the change of trajectory. As a result, a genetic algorithm is employed as an adaptive method for tuning the membership functions of the fuzzy logic planner and the results obtained affirm the potential of the combined methodology