Deep-sea AUV navigation using side-scan sonar images and SLAM

Philipp Woock, Christian Frey
2010 OCEANS'10 IEEE SYDNEY  
Navigating an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is a difficult task. Dead-reckoning navigation is subject to unbounded error due to sensor inaccuracies and is inapplicable for mission durations longer than a few minutes. To limit the estimation errors a global referencing method has to be used. SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) is such a method. It uses repeated recognition of significant features of the environment to reduce the estimation error. Devices for environment sensing
more » ... t are used in most land applications like cameras, laser scanners or GNSS signals cannot be used under water: GNSS signals are attenuated very strongly in water and light propagation suffers mainly from turbid water. In more than a few hundred meters water depth there is also no sunlight. Sonic waves suffer much less from these problems and therefore sonar sensors are the prevalent sensor type used under water. A main difficulty is to extract three-dimensional information from side-scan sonar images to perform SLAM as this is an ill-posed inverse problem. An overview of existing approaches to underwater SLAM using sonar data is given in this paper. A short outlook to the system that will be used in the TIETeK project is also presented.
doi:10.1109/oceanssyd.2010.5603528 fatcat:6y4ubkr3v5cyjbht5xofeh4sae