Underwater vehicle´s long voyage path planning in complex sea condition

The characteristic of path planning for underwater vehicle is large planning area and sparse obstacles, effect of sea current. A new path planning approach in this paper is presented. In the method, trunk binary tree is used for environment modeling and search space generating so that planning area can be ignored. The heuristic evaluation function is designed by colligating path length, Ocean current and obstacles´ cost. A^* heuristic evaluation arithmetic is used for getting the path by the least cost. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) in path planning is used for largely reducing disadvantage effect of ocean current and energy cost more. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of this approach which fulfills the demand of path planning for underwater vehicle.