Path planning for underwater gliders using iterative optimization

Abstract

Underwater gliders constitute a technology in active development, which has proven very promising in Ocean Research because of its relative low cost and long mission range. Due to their low surge speed, however, gliders are strongly affected by ocean currents, making path planning a crucial tool for this type of vehicles. In this work, we present a novel path planning algorithm for gliders based on iterative optimization that shows promising results in realistic simulations. This method reflects accurately the vehicle operation pattern and exhibits a better performance when compared with alternative approaches that are compared in this paper.