Machine Learning Algorithms for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Navigation

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) play an extremely important role in the fields of oceanography, marine science and underwater infrastructure assessment. Of course, underwater navigation isn't easy either due to varying ocean currents, limited vision, and there's no GPS. This article uses machine learning techniques to describe how AUV navigation can be improved in underwater environments with unknown environment, then enable more reliable decision making and real time obstacle avoidance. This thesis investigates many ML approaches for route planning, sensor data fusion, and obstacle detection including supervised, unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. With great significance, reinforcement learning algorithms can optimize trial and error learning based navigation techniques to be adapted to novel situations. Additionally, deep leaning algorithms combined with data from sensors such as sonar and cameras are able to enable precise underwater landscape perception and mapping. We apply these algorithms to virtual and physical AUV missions and demonstrate that they result in significant increases in navigation precision, energy efficiency, and mission time. This research's careful consideration of the potential of machine learning for transforming AUV navigation makes more intelligent and autonomous underwater operations possible in many marine sectors.