Xu Liao ^1,2 Le Li ^1* Chuangxia Huang ^2,3 Xian Zhao ^1,2 Shumin Tan ¹

• ¹ School of Meteorology and Oceanography, National University of Defense Technology,, Changsha, Anhui Province, China
• ² School of Mathematics and Statistics, Changsha University of Science and Technology,, Changsha, Anhui Province, China
• ³ College of Science, Hunan University of Science and Engineering, Yongzhou, China

How to improve the success rate of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) path planning and reduce travel time as much as possible is a very challenging and crucial problem in the practical applications of AUV in the complex ocean current environment. Traditional reinforcement learning algorithms lack exploration of the environment, and the strategies learned by the agent may not generalize well to other different environments. To address these challenges, we propose a novel AUV path planning algorithm named the Noisy Dueling Double Deep Q-Network (ND3QN) algorithm by modifying the reward function and introducing a noisy network, which generalizes the traditional D3QN algorithm. Compared with the classical algorithm (e.g., Rapidly-exploring Random Trees Star (RRT*), DQN, and D3QN), with simulation experiments conducted in realistic terrain and ocean currents, the proposed ND3QN algorithm demonstrates the outstanding characteristics of a higher success rate of AUV path planning, shorter travel time, and smoother paths.