A multi-subpopulation bacterial foraging optimisation algorithm with deletion and immigration strategies for unmanned surface vehicle path planning

With the advantages of flexible control ability, unmanned surface vehicle (USV) has been widely applied in civil and military fields. A number of researchers have been working on the development of intelligent path planning algorithms to plan a high-quality and collision-free path which is applied to guide USV through cluttered environments. The conventional algorithms may either have issues with trapping into a local optimal solution or face a slow convergence problem. This paper presents a novel multi-subpopulation bacterial foraging optimisation (MS-BFO) algorithm for USV path planning that enhances the searching performance, especially, in a complex environment. This method constructs the deletion and immigration strategies (DIS), which guarantees the elite optimised individual of each subpopulation to be inherited by others, thus to consequently lead to fast convergence speed. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to suggest an optimised path within the shortest length of time, compared with other optimisation algorithms.