A Terrain-Aided Tracking Algorithm for Marine Systems

This paper presents a novel method for incorporating unstructured, natural terrain information into the process of tracking of underwater vehicles. Terrainaided navigation promises to revolutionise the ability of marine systems to track underwater bodies in deepwater applications. This work represents a crucial step in the development of underwater technologies capable of long-term, reliable deployment. A particle based estimator is used to incorporate observations of altitude into the estimation process. Results of the application of this technique to the tracking of a towed body are shown.

[1]  Hanumant Singh,et al.  Advances in Underwater Robot Vehicles for Deep Ocean Exploration: Navigation, Control, and Survey Operations , 2000 .

[2]  H. Matsumoto,et al.  Seafloor acoustic remote sensing with multibeam echo-sounders and bathymetric sidescan sonar systems , 1993 .

[3]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Robust Monte Carlo localization for mobile robots , 2001, Artif. Intell..

[4]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  A Probabilistic Approach to Concurrent Mapping and Localization for Mobile Robots , 1998, Auton. Robots.

[5]  Fredrik Gustafsson,et al.  Terrain navigation using Bayesian statistics , 1999 .

[6]  Fredrik Gustafsson,et al.  Particle filters for positioning, navigation, and tracking , 2002, IEEE Trans. Signal Process..

[7]  S. Majumder.  Sensor fusion and map building for underwater navigation , 2000 .

[8]  Stefan B. Williams,et al.  Towards terrain-aided navigation for underwater robotics , 2001, Adv. Robotics.

[9]  Fredrik Gustafsson,et al.  Particle filtering and Cramer-Rao lower bound for underwater navigation , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2003. Proceedings. (ICASSP '03)..

[10]  Stefan B. Williams,et al.  Constrained Initialization of the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Algorithm , 2003, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[11]  Vincent Rigaud,et al.  Absolute location of underwater robotic vehicles by acoustic data fusion , 1990, Proceedings., IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[12]  Andrew E. Johnson,et al.  Seafloor map generation for autonomous underwater vehicle navigation , 1996, Auton. Robots.

[13]  Martial Hebert,et al.  Building qualitative elevation maps from side scan sonar data for autonomous underwater navigation , 1991, Proceedings. 1991 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.