Autonomous Search for Hydrothermal Vent Fields with Occupancy Grid Maps

This paper demonstrates the application of occupancy grid mapping to autonomous robotic chemical plume source localization. We formulate the chemical plume tracing problem as one of resolving an occupancy grid map of candidate plume source locations. Our method’s significance is its applicability to scenarios with multiple plume sources. We demonstrate the method on hydrothermal tracer data collected by an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) in the field. The resultant maps indicate both coverage and likely vent locations.

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