Path Planning for Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Based on Improved Particle Swarm Optimization Method

Path planning of Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) is of considerable significance for the underwater navigation, the objective of the path planning is to find an optimal collision-free and the shortest trajectory from the start to the destination. In this paper, a new improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) was proposed to process the global path planning in a static underwater environment for UUV. Firstly, the path planning principle for UUV was established, in which three cost functions, path length, exclusion potential field between the UUV and obstacle, and attraction potential field between UUV and destination, were considered and developed as an optimization objective. Then, on the basis of analysis traditional particle swarm optimization (PSO), the time varying acceleration coefficients and slowly varying function were employed to improve performance of PSO, time-varying acceleration coefficients was utilized to balance the local optimum and global optimum, and slowly varying function was introduced into the updating formula of PSO to expand search space and maintain particle diversity. Finally, numerical simulations verify that, the proposed approach can fulfill path planning problems for UUV successfully.