Path planning using coastal navigation for an underwater structure inspecting H-AUV

Like coastal navigation, which keeps distance from coast for knowing the ship´s position, we consider features on an underwater Jacket structure for safer and more reliable autonomous navigation. The features would be useful information for autonomous navigation as well as localization of hovering-type AUVs (H-AUVs), which inspect an underwater Jacket structure. Based on the feature information, we define the concepts, “certainty” and “reliability”, and we explain a path planning algorithm, which modifies a variation of Bi-RRT algorithm to consider the reliability of paths much more. The simulation experimental results show that the explained path planning algorithm generates safer and more reliable path for autonomous navigation of an H-AUV.