Imaging sonar-aided navigation for autonomous underwater harbor surveillance

Hordur Johannsson, Michael Kaess, Brendan Englot, Franz Hover, John Leonard

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

169 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of drift-free navigation for underwater vehicles performing harbor surveillance and ship hull inspection. Maintaining accurate localization for the duration of a mission is important for a variety of tasks, such as planning the vehicle trajectory and ensuring coverage of the area to be inspected. Our approach only uses onboard sensors in a simultaneous localization and mapping setting and removes the need for any external infrastructure like acoustic beacons.We extract dense features from a forward-looking imaging sonar and apply pair-wise registration between sonar frames. The registrations are combined with onboard velocity, attitude and acceleration sensors to obtain an improved estimate of the vehicle trajectory. We show results from several experiments that demonstrate drift-free navigation in various underwater environments.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIEEE/RSJ 2010 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2010 - Conference Proceedings
Pages4396-4403
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Event23rd IEEE/RSJ 2010 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2010 - Taipei, Taiwan, Province of China
Duration: 18 Oct 201022 Oct 2010

Publication series

NameIEEE/RSJ 2010 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2010 - Conference Proceedings

Conference

Conference23rd IEEE/RSJ 2010 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2010
Country/TerritoryTaiwan, Province of China
CityTaipei
Period18/10/1022/10/10

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