Underwater Mapping and Navigation in GPS-Intermittent Scenarios

The proposed effort addresses development of a stealthy system for underwater environment mapping and navigation. The proposed system is particularly intended to reduce reliance on GPS updates for localization and navigation purposes by exploiting various underwater environment cues. The effort includes determination of an effective suite of sensors for this purpose and development of algorithms for data fusion and navigation. The envisioned application of the proposed system is in local navigation of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that needs to stay underwater for long time periods. In such a scenario, a AUV not having the benefit of frequent GPS updates could nevertheless be required to station-hold within a pre-specified region or perform tasks requiring navigation within the region. To meet this need, the proposed system leverages various sensory modalities including multiple biologically inspired sensor types and builds a local feature map of the operating environment through a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) approach. The utilization of multiple sensory modalities provides redundancy and thus reliability and robustness with applicability to a wide range of operating conditions. Our algorithms developed during Phase I for path planning and region scanning will be utilized in conjunction with SLAM techniques for efficient environment mapping.