Underwater robot navigation around a sphere using electrolocation sense and Kalman filter

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to perform the navigation of an underwater robot equipped with a sensor using the electric sense. The robot navigates in an unbounded environment in presence of spheres. This sensor is inspired of some species of electric fish. A model of this sensor composed of n spherical electrodes is established. The variations of the current due to the presence of the sphere is related to the model of Rasnow [3]. Unscented Kalman Filter is used to localize the robot with respect to the sphere and to estimate the size of the sphere. We show that bio-inspired motions improve the detection of the spheres. We illustrate the efficiency of the method in two cases: a two electrodes sensor and a four electrodes sensor.