Electronic chart based ocean environment development method and its application in digital AUV platform

For the purpose of building a robust AUV controller, which could be used to handle dangerous ocean environment, a method of obtaining benthonic terrain based on Electronic Chart is presented. Firstly, some terrain conversion algorithms for development of the benthonic terrain, such as nearest neighbor interpolation, linear interpolation, cubic interpolation and v4-interpolation are compared; Later a new terrain conversion algorithm for development of the benthonic terrain DTTCGSFD (Delaunay Triangle-based Terrain Considering of Grid, Sparse, Feature Data) is introduced. This method consider the data not only distance constant grid data, Sparse data, but also feature data with the terrain data, such as fathom line etc. In the end, build benthonic terrain making use of Electronic Chart ESRI shapefile database. The result, which is of importance in the AUV research of terrain matching navigation, path planning and obstacle avoidance strategy, has been applied in the research work of our digital AUV platform.