Navigational control of underwater mobile robot using dynamic differential evolution approach

Abstract

This article focuses on the navigational control of underwater mobile robot. Differential evolution approach has been used to navigate the underwater robot from source to destination while avoiding various types of obstacles. Differential evolution algorithm has been employed to find out the robot’s global best pose among a set of possible solutions based on the fitness value with respect to the current sensory data about obstacles and target. Such evolutionary computation scheme can provide desirable convergence, diversity and also robustness depending on proper selection and adaptive tuning of parameters. Self-learning ability of the parameters in the path planning algorithm is crucial to deal with nonlinearities and ambiguities of hydrodynamics as created by high-frequency oscillations during underwater motion. A sequence of intermediate positions chosen by proposed dynamic differential evolution algorithm between start and goal points can be defined as a near-optimum path for underwater robot. During navigation of the robot, the path smoothness and clearance from obstacles and computational time are also considered for performance evaluation of implemented algorithm. The feasibility of the proposed underwater motion planning approach has been authenticated through the simulation and experimental results.