Path Planning of a Large-scale Underwater Glider Swarm Area Coverage Detection

When search tasks in an underwater glider swarm are conducted, the detection efficiency of the swarm can be improved effectively by setting the search path of each platform reasonably, thereby maximizing the coverage of the detection area with the least platform. To solve the problem of large calculations in large-scale swarm mission planning, this study constructs a high-precision Boolean model based on the grid method to evaluate the coverage ability of an underwater glider swarm by delimiting the effective coverage area geometrically and inverting the grid number. With this as a support, a swarm intelligence algorithm can then be used to realize fast path planning of a large-scale swarm in a wide sea area. Accordingly, this research proposes a method for solving the minimum number of swarm platforms with only few calculations by using sequential thought. The feasibility of this method is verified through a simulation experiment. The proposed method can support mission planning for large-scale underwater glider swarms.