Path Planning for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Docking in Stationary Obstacle Environment

In this paper, we study the curvature-constrained path planning problem for AUV docking in stationary obstacle environment. Expanded obstacle circles are used to redefine the polygonal obstacles, thus the curvature constraint is incorporated into the path planning algorithm. Unlike the existing algorithms that try to avoid the obstacles when the planning path collides with them, the novel algorithm proposed in this paper takes the overall situation into consideration from the very beginning. Modeling the path planning problem using graph theory, the algorithm guarantees to generate the optimal Dubins path in polynomial complexity. The simulation results show that this algorithm outperforms the existing ones in terms of the path length.