A global motion control strategy using dynamic programming

A computational method to obtain autonomous marine vehicle guidance strategies is proposed. It was developed so that good performances are achieved for cheap computational effort. Strategies are obtained by solving a control optimization problem. The performance index under optimization includes energy consumption, risk of collision and travel time. The main contribution of the article is the stochastic formulation of this problem, which enables the modelling of collision risk in a natural way. By taking into account the knowledge of a given path between the start and finish points, it is possible to establish a precedence relationship between any two points in the vehicle circulation domain. This relationship enables the efficient solution of the problem by using dynamic programming