A Unifying Task Priority Approach for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Integrating Homing and Docking Maneuvers

This research proposes a unified guidance and control framework for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) based on the task priority control approach, incorporating various behaviors such as path following, terrain following, obstacle avoidance, as well as homing and docking to stationary and moving stations. The integration of homing and docking maneuvers into the task priority framework is thus a novel contribution of this paper. This integration allows, for example, to execute homing maneuvers close to uneven seafloor or obstacles, ensuring the safety of the AUV, as safety tasks can be given the highest priority. Furthermore, another contribution shown in the paper is that the proposed approach tackles a wide range of scenarios without ad hoc solutions. Indeed, the proposed approach is well suited for both the emerging trend of resident AUVs, which stay underwater for a long period inside garage stations, exiting to perform inspection and maintenance missions and homing back to them, and for AUVs that are required to dock to moving stations such as surface vehicles, or towed docking stations. The proposed techniques are studied in a simulation setting, taking into account the rich number of aforementioned scenarios.