Coverage path planning for underwater pole inspection using an autonomous underwater vehicle

This paper presents a pre-mission coverage path planning specifically for visual inspection of a well-characterized underwater pole using an autonomous underwater vehicle. The target environment is modelled as a planar map for easy path planning. Various inspection paths are constructed based on the survey of current available coverage trajectories. Then, all the designed paths are analyzed to find a time optimal path among them which is able to provide complete coverage on the underwater pole surface while minimize the operational time needed. A robust property is added into the planned path to achieve robustness against the position uncertainty of autonomous underwater vehicle.