Underwater environments provide significant opportunities for innovative research in various scientific fields and can have high economic interest in numerous commercial applications. To monitor diverse phenomena in an unattended manner, it is necessary to develop suitable observatory systems. In this work we describe the development of an autonomous submarine imaging system for bubble detection, the implementation of which addresses the challenges of deployment in extreme environments, such as those encountered in highly active underwater hydrothermal fields. To address the bubble detection problem, we train state-of-the-art object detection models using a manually collected dataset containing a large number of images in a real environment. Our models exhibit promising results both in terms of evaluation metrics and qualitative assessment.

This paper describes a probabilistic surface matching method for pose-based bathymetry SLAM using a multibeam sonar profiler. The proposed algorithm compounds swath profiles of the seafloor with dead reckoning localization to build surface patches. Then, a probabilistic implementation of the ICP is used to deal with the uncertainty of the robot pose as well as the measured points in a two-stage process including point-to-point and point-to-plane metrics. A novel surface adaptation using octrees is proposed to have ICP-derived methods working in feature-poor or highly unstructured areas typical of bathymetric scenarios. Moreover, a heuristic based on the uncertainties of the surface points is used to improve the basic algorithm, decreasing the ICP complexity to O(n). The performance of the method is demonstrated with real data from a bathymetric survey.

This paper presents a navigation system for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) which merges standard dead reckoning navigation data with absolute position fixes from an Ultra-Short Base Line (USBL) system. Traditionally, the USBL transceiver is located on the surface, which makes necessary to feed the position fixes back to the AUV by means of an acoustic modem. An Information filter, which maintains a bounded circular buffer of past vehicle poses, is in charge of the sensor data fusion while dealing with the delays induced by the acoustic communication. The method is validated using a data set gathered for a dam inspection task.

This paper proposes a pose-based algorithm to solve the full Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) problem for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), navigating in an unknown and possibly unstructured environment. A probabilistic scan matching technique using range scans gathered from a Mechanical Scanning Imaging Sonar (MSIS) is used together with the robot dead-reckoning displacements. The proposed method utilizes two Extended Kalman Filters (EKFs). The first, estimates the local path traveled by the robot while forming the scan as well as its uncertainty, providing position estimates for correcting the distortions that the vehicle motion produces in the acoustic images. The second is an augmented state EKF that estimates and keeps the registered scans poses. The raw data from the sensors are processed and fused in-line. No priory structural information or initial pose are considered. Also, a method of estimating the uncertainty of the scan matching estimation is provided. The algorithm has been tested on an AUV guided along a 600 m path within a marina environment, showing the viability of the proposed approach.

This paper proposes MSISpIC, a probabilistic sonar scan matching algorithm for the localization of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The technique uses range scans gathered with a Mechanical Scanning Imaging Sonar (MSIS), the robot displacement estimated through dead-reckoning using a Doppler velocity log (DVL) and a motion reference unit (MRU). The proposed method is an extension of the pIC algorithm. An extended Kalman filter (EKF) is used to estimate the robot-path during the scan in order to reference all the range and bearing measurements as well as their uncertainty to a scan fixed frame before registering. The major contribution consists of experimentally proving that probabilistic sonar scan matching techniques have the potential to improve the DVL-based navigation. The algorithm has been tested on an AUV guided along a 600 m path within an abandoned marina underwater environment with satisfactory results.