AUV—state-of-the-art and prospect

Autonomous underwater vehicle(AUV), as a sophisticated system integration of artificial intelligence, underwater target detection and identification, data fusion, intelligent control, communication and navigation sub-systems, is an unmanned platform to carry out various civil and military missions in complex ocean environments. Owing to the expectation that AUV will be very promising in maritime research and ocean development and it also may find its way of application in the future underwater conflict for intelligence acquisition, accurate attack and “asymmetric intelligent acupunctural warfare”, AUV tech is an important and active field of RD,especially in the big powers of the world. State-of-the-art and main trend of development are presented based on our own (domestic) practice and experiences in related technical problems and suggestive proposals for probable way of solution to the problems are offered. The related areas are as follows: vehicle (carrier/platform) design, architecture, control, intelligent planning and decision making, AUV simulation and virtual reality, underwater target detection and identification, reliability and fault-tolerant techniques,etc. With the development of science and artificial intelligence, we'll see encouraging results in many enabling techniques for AUV. However, AUV technology is still in its stage of basic research, test and development, and there is still a long way to go for its full availability.