A Navigation System for an Underwater Vehicle using the Self-Organizing Map

摘要

Underwater vehicles are expected as the attractive tools for thernoperation in the extreme environment such as the deep ocean survey.rnIn order to realize the useful and practical robots which can work inrnthe ocean, underwater vehicles should take their action by judging thernchanging condition from their own sensors and actuators, and arerndesirable to make their behavior with limited efforts of the operators,rnbecause of features caused by the working environment. Therefore, thernmobile robot should be autonomous and adaptive to their environment.rnDevelopment of the path planning system which can navigate thernvehicle without the collision to the obstacles is one of the mostrnimportant problems in order to realize the autonomous underwaterrnvehicles. In this paper, Self-Organizing Map (SOM) proposed byrnKohonen are applied to the navigation which takes the distances to thernsurroundings as inputs, and outputs the direction for the robot tornproceed. The efficiency of path planning system is investigatedrnthrough the simulation and experiments with an underwater vehiclernòTwin-Burgeró.