In order to insure that autonomous underwater vehicle completes the tasks successfully in unstructured and hazardous oceanic environment with the high pressure and low visibility, an efficient and effective fault-tolerant control system becomes imperative for AUVs.

The autonomous control system of autonomous underwater vehicle(short for AUV)is very important for safty and validity of mission execution.

And the emphasis of this thesis is the research of the 3-Dimensional Global Path Planning for autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV).

The challengeable research of AUVs formation controlling has received considerable attention, which has become one of the classic and representative problems in Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) field.

Ocean is a fundamental composing part of life system, and the application of Underwater Vehicles; especially the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is widely applied with the development on the ocean.

When an autonomous underwater vehicle is in marine survey,in order for it to adjust to a wide variety of situations rapidly,replanning decisions must be taken to find the best scheme to finish the mission satisfactorily and ensure the vehicle s safety.

It is necessary for AUV(autonomous underwater vehicle) to have the ability of obstacles-avoidance during a long range travel in the unknown ocean environment.

The ability of obstacle avoidance based on forward looking sonar is a basic requirement of AUV(autonomous underwater vehicle) during a long range travel in the unknown ocean environment.

Basing on the terrain scanning mission,this paper focuses on the problem of mission and task coordination method at the planning layer of AUV(Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) control system.