Showing papers by "Paul Newman published in 1998"

Using sonar in terrain-aided underwater navigation

Abstract: In many ways autonomous navigation of underwater vehicles is a 'holy grail' of subsea robotics. For an AUV to continually estimate its pose (position and orientation) and operate within an initially unknown environment a solution is required to the simultaneous map building and localisation or 'SLAM' problem. The paper describes and investigates an inertial and terrain based approach to this problem. The fusion of body frame inertial and sonar based world frame feature information can form part of a robust navigation algorithm suitable for implementation in both artificial and natural environments. Particular attention is given to the role of the sonar and its ability to detect and track terrain features.

Towards Terrain Aided Navigation of a Subsea Vehicle

Abstract: Robust navigation of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle in an initially unknown environment is an important goal in the field of AUV research. Fulfilment of this goal requires the development of computationally feasible navigation algorithms that explicitly account for imperfect noise corrupted sensor data and an inability to model perfectly the behaviour of the vehicle. These shortcomings manifest themselves as inaccurate internal representations of the environment and time drifting errors in perceived position and attitude. Prudent fusion of sensor data would allow the construction of an internal world map and simultaneous navigation within the environment [Uhlmann, 1994][Leonard and Durrant-Whyte, 1991][M. Csorba and Durrant-Whyte, 1996]. This paper describes the work occurring at Sydney University in the field of underwater robotics with the aim of producing an AUV capable of autonomous navigation. The AUV Oberon will be introduced and the thinking behind its computational and sensory architecture explained.