Research Summaries

Back Feature-Based Navigation for Mine Countermeasures

Fiscal Year 2012
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Investigator(s) Horner, Douglas P.
Sponsor Office of Naval Research (Navy)
Summary The goal of the research is to develop and implement a framework for a group of AUVs to collaborate for a complete survey of a harbor; to do so requires advances in control, networking and sensory perception. Regarding control, a multi-vehicle implementation is required that ideally keeps the vehicles underwater at all times since surfacing either gives away the position of the vehicle or subjects them to collisions with surface traffic. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is an appropriate navigational methodology for this type of survey for two reasons: First vehicles build navigation maps based on underwater features which permits the vehicles to stay underwater instead of surfacing for GPS fixes. Second, there are typically lots of natural and man-made features in harbors. A key innovation in this research is distributed localization. It is the ability to localize multiple vehicles from the features detected by one AUV. This is accomplished through a range distance messaging protocol with an underwater acoustic communication network.
Keywords
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal