There has been an increasing interest in the use of autonomous underwater vehicles for ocean exploration. Side scan sonars are often installed onboard these vehicles to survey the sea floor. In this context, the need to transmit side scan sonar images over an acoustic low-bandwidth channel calls for the use of compression techniques. This paper proposes a wavelet-based method for compressing si...

This paper presents a novel approach to mobile robot localization using sonar sensors. This approach is based on the use of particle filters. Each particle is augmented with local environment information which is updated during the mission execution. An experimental characterization of the sonar sensors used is provided in the paper. A probabilistic measurement model that takes into account the...

Panoramic sweeps produced by a scanning range sensor often defy interpretation using conventional line-of-sight models, particularly when the environment contains curved, specularly reflective surfaces. Combining multiple scans from different vantage points provides geometric constraints necessary to solve this problem, but not without introducing new difficulties. Existing multiple scan implem...

The intimate details regarding the coevolution of bats and moths have been elucidated over the past 50 years. The bat-moth story began with the evolution of bat sonar, an exquisite ultrasonic system for tracking prey through the night sky. Moths countered with ears tuned to the high frequencies of bat echolocation and with evasive action through directed turns, loops, spirals, drops, and power ...

A fundanental sub-problem of the task of interpreting the sonar data gathered by a mobile subnersible robot vehicle is that of constructing and maintaining a stationary global reference frame in which interpretation can take place. Such a frane nay be established by tracking the movements of objects in the local environment of the robot and using the data so obtained to deduce the motion of the...

This paper introduces a water quality data measurement and analysis system equipped in underwater robot. The system consists of sonar navigation module, inertial navigation module equipped in underwater robot, data processing module and sensor detection module. Sonar navigation module and inertial navigation module equipped in underwater robot are separately used to detect current speed, azimut...

This work explores techniques for sonar sensor fusion in the context of environmental feature detection and identification for navigation tasks. By detecting common features in indoor environments and using them as landmarks, a robot can navigate reliably, recovering its pose when necessary. Preliminary results on a multiple hypothesis testing procedure for feature localization and identificati...

We have recently introduced a novel approach to sonarbased object recognition for robotics. The sonar recognition system—consisting of a Polaroid sonar coupled with an A/D data acquisition board in a LINUX-based PC— uses a fuzzy ARTMAP neural network classification system to recognize objects at varying distances. In this article we report additional results in which we test systematically reco...

This paper investigates the problem of concurrent mapping and localization (CML) using forward look sonar data. Results are presented from processing of an oceanic data set from an 87 kHz US Navy forward look imaging sonar using the stochastic mapping method for CML. The goal is to detect objects on the seabed, map their locations, and concurrently compute an improved trajectory for the vehicle...