Demonstration of a vision-based dead-reckoning system for navigation of an underwater vehicle

This paper describes a dead-reckoning navigation system for hover-capable underwater vehicles operating close to the ocean floor. Navigation is presented as an extension of underwater station-keeping and mosaicking. It combines real-time vision-processing to build a mosaic of the area of interest, an image-based user interface to specify desired vehicle locations, and vision-based dead-reckoning to compute the robot's position in the mosaic. This system provides a high-level interface between the vehicle and the pilot, who specifies the goal (e.g., go to and hover over this feature) instead of the commands to execute the task (e.g., rotate to the left, go forward, stop). Thus, it is an enabling technology for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV)-for which commanding actuators directly is not feasible-and a useful high-level interface for remotely operated vehicles (ROV). This new capability is the result of our on-going research with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI).