11 accepted papers
This work was developed under the need for an acoustic localization system to monitor marine protected areas (MPAs) with the help of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Although the use of acoustic signals for underwater localization has been previously studied, most of the solutions rely on filt…
Acoustic perception in underwater environments is challenging due to the low frequency of the acquisition system and multiple and huge sources of noise. Therefore, point clouds built by profiling sonars mounted on Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) are sparse and noisy. To solve the mapping task,…
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have been extensively used for open-sea exploration. However, the mapping or inspection of complex underwater structures, which have an interest from the scientific and the industrial point of view, is still carried out by professional divers or remotely operate
Underwater robots are subject to complex hydro-dynamic forces. These forces define how the vehicle moves, so it is important to consider them when planning trajectories. However, performing motion planning considering the dynamics on the robot’s onboard computer is challenging due to the limited com…
Three-dimensional mapping of submerged industrial facilities or underwater sites with complex geometries is still a challenge for nowadays autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which are restricted to more simple survey missions. This letter presents a complete framework to plan and execute autonom
Achieving full autonomous robotic environment exploration in the underwater domain is very challenging, mainly due to noisy acoustic sensors, high localization error, control disturbances of the water and lack of accurate underwater maps. In this work we present a robotic exploration algorithm for u…
In real-world robotics, motion planning remains to be an open challenge. Not only robotic systems are required to move through unexplored environments, but also their manoeuvrability is constrained by their dynamics and often suffer from uncertainty. One approach to overcome this problem is to incre…
In this letter, we propose a method to automate the exploration of unknown underwater structures for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The proposed algorithm iteratively incorporates exteroceptive sensor data and replans the next-best-view in order to fully map an underwater structure. This app
We present a framework for planning collision-free and safe paths online for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in unknown environments. We build up on our previous work and propose an improved approach. While preserving its main modules (mapping, planning and mission handler), the framework now…
We present a framework for planning collision-free paths online for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in unknown environments. It is composed of three main modules (mapping, planning and mission handler) that incrementally explore the environment while solving start-to-goal queries. We use an oc…
Autonomous manipulation of objects requires reliable information on robot-object contact state. Underwater environments can adversely affect sensing modalities such as vision, making them unreliable. In this paper we investigate underwater robot-object contact perception between an autonomous underw…