Enhancing unmanned marine vehicle path planning: A fractal-enhanced chaotic grey wolf and differential evolution approach

Efficient path planning is challenging for optimizing the trajectory of uncrewed marine vehicles navigating complex environments. However, when the global optimum is zero, path planning optimization encounters a significant challenge, a major shortcoming of the grey wolf optimizer (GWO). This study intentionally integrates multiple approaches to present a comprehensive methodology called fractal-enhanced chaotic GWO (FECGWO) in conjunction with differential evolution (DE) to fill this research gap. This method uses DE to strengthen the local search or exploitation phases, chaotic maps to improve the exploration phase, and fractals to fine-tune the transition between the two phases. In addition to testing against 46 sophisticated benchmark maps, this study carries out practical experimentation over commonly utilized meta-heuristic algorithms to comprehensively evaluate the proposed hybrid model's performance (FECGWO-DE). This thorough evaluation demonstrates notable advancements in unmanned marine vehicle path planning. The evaluation criteria include path length, consistency, time complexity, and success rate. These metrics illustrate the statistical significance of the novel methodology's improvements. The study demonstrates that FECGWO can precisely identify the best routes in given test maps, offering insightful information for developing path planning optimization—especially concerning unmanned marine vehicles.