An Effective Obstacle Avoidance and Motion Planning Design for Underwater Telescopic Arm Robots Based on a Tent Chaotic Dung Beetle Algorithm

Abstract

As the underwater environment is complex, the existence of obstacles will produce a certain collision interference to underwater robot operations, which causes the overall path planning and time costs to increase. In this paper, we propose a Tent chaotic mapping and dung beetle hybrid algorithm (MDBO) application for trajectory optimal planning and effective obstacle avoidance for an underwater telescopic arm robot. The method invokes the unique obstacle avoidance habit and foraging optimization idea of the dung beetle algorithm. Introducing it into the chaotic Tent mapping idea prevents the dung beetle algorithm (DBO) from falling into local optimality and increases the coverage of a global search. Simulation results show that the MDBO algorithm exhibits strong optimization ability and stability when multiple algorithms are verified using eight test functions. The MATLAB test reflects the performance indexes of the six joints of the underwater telescopic arm, and compared with various algorithms, the MDBO algorithm has an obvious convergence trend and strong global search ability. The algorithm is applied to real underwater experiments to verify that the improved dung beetle algorithm has better obstacle avoidance ability and reduces trajectory planning time by 30%, which helps the underwater robot to complete motion planning.