A bio-inspired strategy for deep-sea hydrothermal non-buoyant plume tracing with autonomous underwater vehicles

Deep-sea hydrothermal plume tracing capability is important for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to efficiently perform hydrothermal vents prospecting missions. This paper addresses the hydrothermal non-buoyant plume tracing problem: an AUV tracks a hydrothermal non-buoyant plume in horizontal plane to its upflow source (the top terminal of a hydrothermal buoyant plume) and localize the source. Inspired by the zigzag behaviors exhibited by insects when performing chemical plume tracing missions, we propose a hydrothermal non-buoyant plume tracing strategy that aims to enable an AUV to track a hydrothermal non-buoyant plume in two dimensions and to localize the plume source, and develop a behavior-based planning algorithm to implement the strategy. The bio-inspired strategy was implemented both in a computer simulation environment and on an AUV to conduct simulation and experiments, and the simulation results and the experimental results on the AUV tracking Rhodamine dye plumes in near shore ocean environments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.