Coverage Path Planning for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
Doctoral thesis “Coverage Path Planning for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles” By Enric Galceran, PhD student of the Doctoral Program in Technology Supervised by Dr. Marc Carreras Pérez Abstract At present, a mission to survey the ocean floor with an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) is typically planned by selecting a list of waypoints that then the vehicle will automatically navigate through while keeping a safe distance from the bottom. Nonetheless, this approach has major drawbacks: (1) it does not allow the vehicle to safely operate amidst protrusions on the sea floor; (2) when traversing rugged terrain, the vehicle is forced to…