Three-Dimensional Underwater Path Planning of Submarine Considering the Real Marine Environment

Abstract

The submarine is an underwater ship that can perform a variety of combat missions in a complex marine environment. Path planning of submarines has always been the focus of military marine engineering research. In most practical applications, there are numerous marine physical phenomena in the marine environment, such as pycnocline, density fronts, mesoscale eddy, etc., which have an important impact on the navigation of submarines. First, the artificial potential field heuristic factor is introduced into the ant colony algorithm to improve its convergence speed, and the artificial potential field ant colony optimization (APF-ACO) is obtained. In addition, this article uses the unit-body to reflect the regional physical elements and quantifies the physical marine phenomenon in the form of the cost function, which is used to solve the problem of submarine path planning in the complex marine environment. In this article, the algorithm is tested in a real marine data environment. The experimental results show that the algorithm can realize the utilization of the ocean sound speed environment, ocean density environment and ocean current environment, and obtain a path more suitable for submarine underwater navigation.

Keywords

• Submarine
• complex marine environment
• three-dimensional path planning
• artificial potential field (APF)
• ant colony optimization (ACO)