Continuous path smoothing for deep-sea mining vehicles using B-spline curves

The original path produced by the path planning algorithm has many sharp points, and the deep-sea mining vehicles (DSMV) need to accelerate and decelerate frequently or even turn in place, which is not conducive to saving energy. The smoothness and continuity of paths are more suitable for DSMV traveling on the seabed, and this paper proposes a path smoothing algorithm based on cubic B-spline curves. According to the motion characteristics of the DSMV, the force analysis of its steering process is conducted to derive the constraint of the minimum turning radius under the skidding condition. It is applied as a curvature constraint in the proposed smoothing algorithm, and simulation experiments are carried out in 2D terrain and 3D terrain, respectively. The results show that the smoothed path satisfies the maximum curvature constraint and guarantees <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>C</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> continuity, which better matches the requirements for mining vehicles on the seabed.