3D Space Path Planning of Complex Environmental Underwater Vehicle

Path planning is one of the key techniques of underwater vehicle´s intelligent control system, whose purpose is to find a collision-free path from the source position to the destination position according to some optimization criteria. The ant colony optimization (ACO) is for path planning of underwater vehicle in three-dimensional space. A path optimization search algorithm based on ACO is proposed, while pheromone representation, route point choosing rules, heuristic functions and pheromone updating rules are discussed in detail. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has better searching capability and performs path planning in three-dimensional space effectively.