Underwater Scan Matching using a Mechanical Scanned Imaging Sonar
IFAC Symposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAV)
Underwater environments are extremely challenging to perform localization. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) are usually endowed with acoustic devices such as a Mechanically Scanned Imaging Sonar (MSIS). This sensor scans the environment by emitting ultrasonic pulses and it provides echo intensity profiles of the scanned area. Our goal is to provide self-localization capabilities to an AUV endowed with a MSIS. To this end, this paper proposes a scan matching strategy to estimate the robot motion. This strategy extracts range information from the sensor data, deals with the large scan times and performs a probabilistic data association. The proposal is tested with real data obtained during a trip in a marina environment, and the results show the benefits of our proposal by comparing it to other well known approaches.