Towards Micro Robot Hydrobatics: Vision-based Guidance, Navigation, and Control for Agile Underwater Vehicles in Confined Environments

• Published in: 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) pp. 1819 - 1826
• Main Authors: Duecker, Daniel A, Bauschmann, Nathalie, Hansen, Tim, Kreuzer, Edwin, Seifried, Robert
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 24-10-2020
• Subjects: Autonomous underwater vehicles; Intelligent robots; Location awareness; Navigation; Underwater vehicles
• ISSN: 2153-0866
• DOI: 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341051

Despite the recent progress, guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) are largely unsolved for agile micro autonomous underwater vehicles (µAUVs). Hereby, robust and accurate self-localization systems which fit µAUVs play a key role and their absence constitutes a severe bottleneck in micro underwater robotics research. In this work we present, first, a small-size low-cost high performance vision-based self-localization module which solves this bottleneck even for the requirements of highly agile robot platforms. Second, we present its integration into a powerful GNC-framework which allows the deployment of µAUVs in fully autonomous mission. Finally, we critically evaluate the performance of the localization system and the GNC-framework in two experimental scenarios.