A New Approach of BK products of Fuzzy Relations for Obstacle Avoidance of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

This paper proposes a new heuristic search technique for obstacle avoidance of autonomous underwater vehicles equipped with a looking ahead obstacle avoidance sonar. We suggest the fuzzy relation between the sonar sections and the properties of real world environment. Bandler and Kohout's fuzzy relational method are used as the mathematical implementation for the analysis and synthesis of relations between the partitioned sections of sonar over the real-world environmental properties. The direction of the section with optimal characteristics would be selected as the successive heading of AUVs for obstacle avoidance. For the technique using in this paper, sonar range must be partitioned into multi equal sections; membership functions of the properties and the corresponding fuzzy rule bases are estimated heuristically. With the two properties Safety, Remoteness and sonar range partitioned in seven sections, this study gives the good result that enables AUVs to navigate through obstacles in the optimal way to goal.