There is an increasing demand for piloted autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to operate in polar ice conditions. At present, AUVs are deployed from ships and directly human-piloted in these regions, entailing a high carbon cost and limiting the scope of operations. A key requirement for long-term autonomous missions is a long-range route planning capability that is aware of the changing ice conditions. In this paper we address the problem of automating long-range route-planning for AUVs operating in the Southern Ocean. We present the route-planning method and results showing that efficient, ice-avoiding, long-distance traverses can be planned.
@article{arxiv.2111.00293,
title = {Long-Range Route-planning for Autonomous Vehicles in the Polar Oceans},
author = {Maria Fox and Michael Meredith and J. Alexander Brearley and Dan Jones and Derek Long},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.00293},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Submitted to the AMS Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology