Toward autonomous harbor surveillance

Abstract

In this thesis 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 uses only 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. In addition, an architecture for a persistent mapping is proposed. With the intention of handling long term operations and repetitive surveillance tasks. The proposed architecture is flexible and supports different types of vehicles and mapping methods. The design of the system is demonstrated with an implementation of some of the key features of the system. In addition, methods for re-localization are considered. Finally, results from several experiments that demonstrate drift-free navigation in various underwater environments are presented.