Marine Applications of the Fast Marching Method

Abstract

Path planning is general problem of mobile robots, which has special characteristics when applied to marine applications. In addition to avoid colliding with obstacles, in marine scenarios, environment conditions such as water currents or wind need to be taken into account in the path planning process. In this paper, several solutions based on the Fast Marching Method are proposed. The basic method focus on collision avoidance and optimal planning and, later on, using the same underlying method, the influence of marine currents in the optimal path planning is detailed. Finally, the application of these methods to consider marine robot formations is presented.

Keywords: fast marching; formations; path planning; trajectory planning; vector field fast marching.