Acoustic registration of seafloor features and objects

In an effort to improve and augment the navigation capabilities of autonomous underwater vehicles, researchers from Scientific Solutions, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology propose to develop, design, and build a sonar system tailoredspecifically for concurrent mapping and localization (CML) technologies. A conceptual design stage will be undertaken to determine the optimal frequency range (or ranges), beamwidths, field of view, scan rate, and source power of the system. Anengineering phase will follow and will consider practical constraints such as mechanical interfacing to the parent vehicle, modularity, available power, communications bandwidth, on-board processing and data storage, and integration with alternateautonomous navigation methods (e.g., Doppler Velocity Logs, international navigation). We will demonstrate in simulation the benefit of such a system considering a host of environments, object types, and burial statuses. Improvements in deduced reckoningnavigation technologies will also be predicted. A significant opportunity exists to test a prototype system in the GOATS04 experiment. In recent years, the capabilities of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have increased dramatically. The remaininggap between the long-term envisioned AUV usage and the current state of the art lies largely in the lack of true vehicle autonomy. Vehicles are generally deployed to follow pre-programmed mission trajectories while navigating by pre-deployed beacons. Inorder to achieve a high degree of autonomy over a long mission, the vehicles must have the capability to recognize and use cues in the local terrain to establish position. This capability can significantly reduce the accumulated errors that can build in adeduced reckoning system that is incapable of obtaining an intermittent geodetic or local reference. The positional fixing capability to be gained from this technology, in combination with cooperative, multi-vehicle operations could dramatically improvethe US Navy's capabilities for covert, autonomous underwater mine-hunting.