Energy-Efficient AUV Path Planning Under Multiple Constraints Using a Synergistic Differential Evolution Algorithm

Abstract

Path planning is essential for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to efficiently perform underwater missions. To address the challenges of energy-efficient three-dimensional path planning under multiple constraints, this study proposes a synergistic differential evolution (SDE) algorithm. First, a comprehensive underwater environment model is developed, including a path encoding model and a deterministic pathevaluation method. Second, a synergistic evolution mechanism is introduced to improve global exploration by adaptively sharing the evolutionary information of two synergistic populations. Third, evolutionary guidance is proposed to refine the search direction by integrating successful population movements based on fitness improvements and positional correlations. Finally, a cosine-based strategy is employed to adjust the population size by eliminating low-quality solutions. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, the proposed algorithm achieves average improvements of 2.37% in best fitness, 15.99% in mean fitness, 13.42% in median fitness, 80.69% in standard deviation, 66.65% in convergence quality, and 39.91% in runtime. In addition, AUV field tests further validate the feasibility and reliability of the SDE-based pathplanning approach.

Keywords

Autonomous underwater vehicle / Path planning / Energy optimization / Differential evolution / Swarm intelligence

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Harbin Engineering University and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

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