Online Navigation Planning for Long-term Autonomous Operation of Underwater Gliders
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866908965717147648 |
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| author | Darvariu, Victor-Alexandru Reed, Charlotte Z. Stratmann, Jan Lacerda, Bruno Allsup, Benjamin Woodward, Stephen Siddle, Elizabeth Saeharaseelan, Trishna Jones, Owain Jones, Dan Ferreira, Tobias Baker, Chloe Chaplin, Kevin Kirk, James Iceton-Morris, Ashley Patmore, Ryan D. Polton, Jeff Williams, Charlotte Auckland, Christopher D. J. Hall, Rob A. Kokkinaki, Alexandra Lopez, Alvaro Lorenzo Buck, Justin J. H. Hawes, Nick |
| author_facet | Darvariu, Victor-Alexandru Reed, Charlotte Z. Stratmann, Jan Lacerda, Bruno Allsup, Benjamin Woodward, Stephen Siddle, Elizabeth Saeharaseelan, Trishna Jones, Owain Jones, Dan Ferreira, Tobias Baker, Chloe Chaplin, Kevin Kirk, James Iceton-Morris, Ashley Patmore, Ryan D. Polton, Jeff Williams, Charlotte Auckland, Christopher D. J. Hall, Rob A. Kokkinaki, Alexandra Lopez, Alvaro Lorenzo Buck, Justin J. H. Hawes, Nick |
| contents | Underwater glider robots have become indispensable for ocean sampling, yet fully autonomous long-term operation remains rare in practice. Although stakeholders are calling for tools to manage increasingly large fleets of gliders, existing methods have seen limited adoption due to their inability to account for environmental uncertainty and operational constraints. In this work, we demonstrate that uncertainty-aware online navigation planning can be deployed in real-world glider missions at scale. We formulate the problem as a stochastic shortest-path Markov Decision Process and propose a sample-based online planner based on Monte Carlo Tree Search. Samples are generated by a physics-informed simulator calibrated on real-world glider data that captures uncertain execution of controls and ocean current forecasts while remaining computationally tractable. Our methodology is integrated into an autonomous system for Slocum gliders that performs closed-loop replanning at each surfacing. The system was validated in two North Sea deployments totalling approximately 3 months and 1000 km, representing the longest fully autonomous glider campaigns in the literature to date. Results demonstrate improvements of up to 9.88% in dive duration and 16.51% in path length compared to standard straight-to-goal navigation, including a statistically significant path length reduction of 9.55% in a field deployment. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_19315 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Online Navigation Planning for Long-term Autonomous Operation of Underwater Gliders Darvariu, Victor-Alexandru Reed, Charlotte Z. Stratmann, Jan Lacerda, Bruno Allsup, Benjamin Woodward, Stephen Siddle, Elizabeth Saeharaseelan, Trishna Jones, Owain Jones, Dan Ferreira, Tobias Baker, Chloe Chaplin, Kevin Kirk, James Iceton-Morris, Ashley Patmore, Ryan D. Polton, Jeff Williams, Charlotte Auckland, Christopher D. J. Hall, Rob A. Kokkinaki, Alexandra Lopez, Alvaro Lorenzo Buck, Justin J. H. Hawes, Nick Robotics Artificial Intelligence Underwater glider robots have become indispensable for ocean sampling, yet fully autonomous long-term operation remains rare in practice. Although stakeholders are calling for tools to manage increasingly large fleets of gliders, existing methods have seen limited adoption due to their inability to account for environmental uncertainty and operational constraints. In this work, we demonstrate that uncertainty-aware online navigation planning can be deployed in real-world glider missions at scale. We formulate the problem as a stochastic shortest-path Markov Decision Process and propose a sample-based online planner based on Monte Carlo Tree Search. Samples are generated by a physics-informed simulator calibrated on real-world glider data that captures uncertain execution of controls and ocean current forecasts while remaining computationally tractable. Our methodology is integrated into an autonomous system for Slocum gliders that performs closed-loop replanning at each surfacing. The system was validated in two North Sea deployments totalling approximately 3 months and 1000 km, representing the longest fully autonomous glider campaigns in the literature to date. Results demonstrate improvements of up to 9.88% in dive duration and 16.51% in path length compared to standard straight-to-goal navigation, including a statistically significant path length reduction of 9.55% in a field deployment. |
| title | Online Navigation Planning for Long-term Autonomous Operation of Underwater Gliders |
| topic | Robotics Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19315 |