ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of the motion planning and issues related with the various motion planning tasks of the autonomous underwater vehicles. It argues that the vehicles are nonlinear and underactuated in nature because of the nonholonomic constraints on their generalized velocities. The chapter formulates the motion planning problem for autonomous underwater vehicles, and issues related with the various motion planning tasks and the feedback control design for these examples. System constraints on the mechanical systems whose expression involves generalized coordinates and velocities are known as kinematic constraints of the system, which are also known as the nonholonomic constraints. The motion planning tasks for nonholonomic systems are attained through the use of the feedback controllers. The tasks can be obtained using either the feed-forward or feedback control, or a combination of both. Since the feedback control is generally robust and can work well in the presence of disturbances, use of it is preferred.
