AUV SLAM and Experiments Using a Mechanical Scanning Forward-Looking Sonar

Sensors

Bo He³  Yan Liang³  Xiao Feng³  Rui Nian³  Tianhong Yan¹  Minghui Li² 

[1] School of Mechanical & Electrical Engineering, China Jiliang University, 258 Xueyuan Street, Xiasha High-Edu Park, Hangzhou 310018, China;Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde, 204 George Street, Glasgow G1 1XW, UK; E-Mail:;School of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China, 238 Songling Road, Qingdao 266100, China; E-Mails:

关键词: AUV;    mechanical scanning imaging sonar;    FastSLAM;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s120709386

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Navigation technology is one of the most important challenges in the applications of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) which navigate in the complex undersea environment. The ability of localizing a robot and accurately mapping its surroundings simultaneously, namely the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem, is a key prerequisite of truly autonomous robots. In this paper, a modified-FastSLAM algorithm is proposed and used in the navigation for our C-Ranger research platform, an open-frame AUV. A mechanical scanning imaging sonar is chosen as the active sensor for the AUV. The modified-FastSLAM implements the update relying on the on-board sensors of C-Ranger. On the other hand, the algorithm employs the data association which combines the single particle maximum likelihood method with modified negative evidence method, and uses the rank-based resampling to overcome the particle depletion problem. In order to verify the feasibility of the proposed methods, both simulation experiments and sea trials for C-Ranger are conducted. The experimental results show the modified-FastSLAM employed for the navigation of the C-Ranger AUV is much more effective and accurate compared with the traditional methods.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2012 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.