A path planning strategy for data acquisition task using multiple autonomous underwater vehicles

This paper proposes to investigate the performance of a path planning method for a data acquisition task using multiple cooperative underwater vehicles (MAUV). We present a multiple objective path planning (MOPP) method to find the optimal solutions for the data acquisition task with certain constraints. This method is based on an Interval Programming (IvP) algorithm introduced in [1] for representing and optimizing over multiple competing objective functions. We made improvements to deal with multiple objective optimizations in the underwater environment. The MOPP model is built to respect with different behaviors. Preliminary simulation trials based on two simplified scenarios have been carried out. The results show that the cooperative data acquisition task could be finished satisfactorily and safety.