Using vision for underwater robotics : video mosaics and station keeping

In this paper we discuss the use of vision for underwater vehicles. The work described here has been developed in the context of the European Research Project NARVAL Navigation of Autonomous vehicles via Active Environmental Perception (ESPRIT-LTR project 30185), aiming at designing and implementing reliable navigation systems of limited cost for mobile robots in unstructured environments, without the use of global positioning methods. In this paper, we will focus on two main applications of computer vision in the context of underwater robotics: i) building and using video mosaics of the sea bottom and ii) vision-based control for station keeping and docking. We describe our approach to these tasks and present results obtained during sea exper-

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