Introduction of Rotors to a Virtual Potentials UUV Trajectory Planning Framework

A distributed method for online trajectory planning for coordinated UUVs, developed in authors’ previous work is revisited. Its design is streamlined with a view towards easy, methodical and robust application in code. A programmatic module for computing command signals necessary and fitting for use with lower-level tracking controllers for te UUV's drives, on the basis of simple numerical formulae for integral and derivative approximations is added. Rotors, a vectorized quantity contributing to local minima avoidance, are introduced. This scheme is compared with the existing strategy for local minima avoidance employed previously within the presented framework. Simulation results are given.