This paper presents a path planning methodology which enables Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to navigate in shallow complex environments such as coral reefs. The approach leverages prior information from an aerial photographic survey, and derived bathymetric information of the corresponding area. From these prior maps, a set of features is obtained which define an expected arrangement of objects and bathymetry likely to be perceived by the AUV when underwater. A navigation graph is then constructed by predicting the arrangement of features visible from a set of test points within the prior, which allows the calculation of the shortest paths from any pair of start and destination points. A maximum likelihood function is defined which allows the AUV to match its observations to the navigation graph as it undertakes its mission. To improve robustness, the history of observed features are retained to facilitate possible recovery from non-detectable or misclassified objects. The approach is evaluated using a photo-realistic simulated environment, and results illustrate the merits of the approach even when only a relatively small number of features can be identified from the prior map.

This paper presents two novel approaches for improving image-based underwater obstacle detection by combining sparse stereo point clouds with monocular semantic image segmentation. Generating accurate image-based obstacle maps in cluttered underwater environments, such as coral reefs, are essential for robust robotic path planning and navigation. However, these maps can be challenged by factors including visibility, lighting and dynamic objects (e.g. fish) that may lead to falsely identified free space or dynamic objects which trajectory planners may react to undesirably. We propose combining feature-based stereo matching with learning-based segmentation to produce a more robust obstacle map. This approach considers direct binary learning of the presence or absence of underwater obstacles, as well as a multiclass learning approach to classify their distance (near, mid and far) in the scene. An enhancement to the binary map is also shown by including depth information from sparse stereo matching to produce 3D obstacle maps of the scene. The performance is evaluated using field data collected in cluttered, and at times, visually degraded coral reef environments. The results show improved image-wide obstacle detection, rejection of transient objects (such as fish), and range estimation compared to feature-based sparse and dense stereo point clouds alone.