Reactive Control for Collision Evasion with Extended Obstacles

Evading collisions in three-dimensional underwater environments is critical in exploration of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). In underwater environments, AUV measures an obstacle surface by utilizing a three-dimensional active sonar. This article addresses reactive collision evasion control by considering extended obstacles. Here, an extended obstacle is an arbitrary obstacle that can generate any number of measurements and not a point target generating at most one measurement. Considering 3D environments, our manuscript considers collision evasion with both moving obstacles and static obstacles. The proposed reactive collision evasion controllers are developed by considering hardware limits, such as the maximum speed or acceleration limit of an AUV. We further address how to make an AUV move towards a goal, while avoiding collision with extended obstacles. As far as we know, the proposed collision evasion controllers are novel in handling collision avoidance with an extended obstacle, in the case where an AUV measures 3D-obstacle boundaries by utilizing sonar sensors. The effectiveness of the proposed controllers is demonstrated by MATLAB simulations.