Title:  Path Planning for Underwater Vehicle in Ocean Flow Field

Committee: 

Dr. F. Zhang, Advisor

Dr. Edwards, Co-Advisor

Dr. Zhao, Chair

Dr. Zhou

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is solving the underwater vehicle navigation problem as an instance of the partially observable stochastic optimal control problem. We aim to propose a novel partition-based belief abstraction and symbolic planning method to solve the problem, and theoretically justify the performance of the proposed method, that is, the belief abstraction model results in bounded model reduction error. In addition, the belief abstraction method and replanning scheme guarantee finding a feasible solution to the stochastic optimal control problem. The novel belief abstraction method does not suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Also, performance of the algorithm does not degrade at the presence of nonlinear dynamics and non-Gaussian uncertainty.