DUKW-21 Autonomous Navigation - Autonomous Path Planning for an Amphibious Vehicle

摘要

Amphibious vehicles, which transport cargo from ship to shore, will play a critical role in future Sea Base supply chain operations. During the summer of 2007, a project team of CISD interns developed a design concept called DUKW-21, a manned amphibious vehicle that had autonomous compatibility so that in the future, an autonomous control system could be implemented. To start the design of an autonomous control system for DUKW-21, this 2009 CISD intern project focused on autonomous amphibious path planning. While there have been developments in unmanned vehicle navigation, they have been focused on operations on land, sea or air with no integration of operational modes. Unmanned amphibious vehicles face a unique challenge in autonomously transitioning between sea and land, where there has been little research. This report investigates autonomous navigation by compiling ground and sea path optimization algorithms, a part of the overall amphibious navigation process. It then proposes an original, intuitive, algorithm for transitioning, which bridges the gap between sea and land path planning. Several functional requirements are outlined for the DUKW-21 project that are needed for implementation of the proposed algorithms.