Trajectory planning for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles with safety guarantees

Abstract

This paper addresses the safe trajectory planning problem for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in strong waves that can disturb the AUVs' trajectory tracking abilities and cause vehicle-obstacle and inter-vehicle collisions. A novel trajectory planning method based on the Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) differential game formulation and model predictive control (MPC) is proposed to generate safety-guaranteed trajectories for AUV systems considering wave disturbance that is either time-varying state-independent or time-varying state-dependent. Further, this method allows for the consideration of AUVs with different shapes by incorporating nonlinear smooth collision avoidance constraints ob..