Underwater robot exploration and identification using dual imaging sonar : Basin test

Abstract

For the underwater search task, imaging sonar is very useful equipment to obtain the visual data of the underwater environment. Generally, the search range of imaging sonar depends on the frequency of the sound. High-frequency imaging sonar is suitable to search near area within 5m and low-frequency is able to search the area between 5m to 100m. In this paper, we presents experimental results of landmarks identification using dual imaging sonar for the autonomous underwater robot exploration. The underwater robot explores autonomously and estimates the robot location using inertial sensor data. Artificial landmarks are designed and detected by dual imaging sonar. If the landmark is recognized, it is mapped to the estimated robot map. To verify the suitability of the proposed method, we perform an experiment in basin using the underwater robot, ‘yShark’.