This paper presents a control and operation system for a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). The ROV used in the study was equipped with a manipulator and is being developed for underwater exploration and autonomous underwater working. Precision position and attitude control ability is essential for underwater operation using a manipulator. For propulsion, the ROV is equipped with eight thrusters, the number of those are more than six degrees-of-freedom. Four of them are in charge of surge, sway, and yaw motion, and the other four are responsible for heave, roll, and pitch motion. Therefore, it is more efficient to integrate the management of the thrusters rather than control them individually. In this paper, a thrust allocation method for thruster management is presented, and the design of a feedback controller using sensor data is described. The software for the ROV operation consists of a robot operating system that can efficiently process data between multiple hardware platforms. Through experimental analysis, the validity of the control system performance was verified.

This study focuses on autonomous exploration based on map expansion for an underwater robot equipped with acoustic sonars. Map expansion is applicable to large-area mapping, but it may affect localization accuracy. Thus, as the key contribution of this paper, we propose a method for underwater autonomous exploration wherein the robot determines the trade-off between map expansion ratio and position accuracy, selects which of the two has higher priority, and then moves to a mission step. An occupancy grid map is synthesized by utilizing the measurements of an acoustic range sonar that determines the probability of occupancy. This information is then used to determine a path to the frontier, which becomes the new search point. During area searching and map building, the robot revisits artificial landmarks to improve its position accuracy as based on imaging sonar-based recognition and EKF-SLAM if the position accuracy is above the predetermined threshold. Additionally, real-time experiments were conducted by using an underwater robot, yShark, to validate the proposed method, and the analysis of the results is discussed herein.

Acoustic based localization is essential to operate autonomous robotic systems in underwater environment where the use of sensorial data is limited. This paper proposes a localization method using artificial underwater acoustic sources. The proposed method acquires directional angles of acoustic sources using time difference of arrivals of two hydrophones. For this purpose, a probabilistic approach is used for accurate estimation of the time delay. Then, Gaussian sum filter based SLAM technique is used to localize both acoustic sources and underwater vehicle. It is performed by using bearing of acoustic sources as measurement and inertial sensors as prediction model. The proposed method can handle directional ambiguity of time difference based source localization by generating Gaussian models corresponding to possible locations of both front and back sides. Through these processes, the proposed method can provide reliable localization method for underwater vehicles without any prior information of source locations. The performance of the proposed method is verified by experimental results conducted in a real sea environment.

Localization of underwater vehicle is essential to use underwater robotic systems for various applications effectively. For this purpose, this paper presents a method of two-dimensional SLAM for underwater vehicles equipped with two hydrophones. The proposed method uses directional angles for underwater acoustic sources. A target signal transmitted from acoustic source is extracted using band-pass filters. Then, directional angles are estimated based on Bayesian process with generalized cross-correlation. The acquired angles are used as measurements for EKF-SLAM to estimate both vehicle location and locations of acoustic sources. Through these processes, the proposed method provides reliable estimation for two dimensional locations of underwater vehicles. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed method in a real sea environment.

In this paper we present (1) analysis of imaging sonar measurement for two-view relative pose estimation of an autonomous vehicle and (2) bundle adjustment and 3D reconstruction method using imaging sonar. Sonar has been a popular sensor for underwater application due to its robustness to water turbidity and visibility in water medium. While vision based motion estimation has been applied to many ground vehicles for motion estimation and 3D reconstruction, imaging sonar addresses challenges in relative sensor frame motion. We focus on the fact that the sonar measurement inherently poses ambiguity in its measurement. This paper illustrates the source of the ambiguity in sonar measurements and summarizes assumptions for sonar based robot navigation. For validation, we synthetically generated underwater seafloor with varying complexity to analyze the error in the motion estimation.

This paper proposes an underwater localization algorithm using probabilistic object recognition. It is organized as follows; 1) recognizing artificial objects using imaging sonar, and 2) localizing the recognized objects and the vehicle using EKF(Extended Kalman Filter) based SLAM. For this purpose, we develop artificial landmarks to be recognized even under the unstable sonar images induced by noise. Moreover, a probabilistic recognition framework is proposed. In this way, the distance and bearing of the recognized artificial landmarks are acquired to perform the localization of the underwater vehicle. Using the recognized objects, EKF-based SLAM is carried out and results in a path of the underwater vehicle and the location of landmarks. The proposed localization algorithm is verified by experiments in a basin.

This paper compares methods for attitude estimation of a UUV(Unmanned Underwater Vehicle). Attitude estimation plays a key role in underwater navigation using DVL(Doppler Velocity Log). The paper proposes attitude estimation methods using EKF(Extended Kalman Filter), UKF(Unscented Kalman Filter), and CF(Complementary Filter). It derives methods using the measurements from MEMS-AHRS(Microelectromechanical Systems-Attitude Heading Reference System) and DVL. The methods are used for navigation in a test pool and their navigation performance is compared. The results suggest that even if there is no measurement relative to some absolute landmarks, DVL-only navigation can be useful for navigation in a limited time and range.

Acoustic signal is crucial for the autonomous navigation of underwater vehicles. For this purpose, this paper presents a method of acoustic source localization. The proposed method is based on the probabilistic estimation of time delay of acoustic signals received by two hydrophones. Using Bayesian update process, the proposed method can provide reliable estimation of direction angle of the acoustic source. The acquired direction information is used to estimate the location of the acoustic source. By accumulating direction information from various vehicle locations, the acoustic source localization is achieved using extended Kalman filter. The proposed method can provide a reliable estimation of the direction and location of the acoustic source, even under for a noisy acoustic signal. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed acoustic source localization method in a real sea environment.

The camera has limitations of poor visibility in underwater environment due to the limited light source and medium noise of the environment. However, its usefulness in close range has been proved in many studies, especially for navigation. Thus, in this paper, vision-based object detection and tracking techniques using artificial objects for underwater robots have been studied. We employed template matching and mean shift algorithms for the object detection and tracking methods. Also, we propose the weighted correlation coefficient of adaptive threshold -based and color-region-aided approaches to enhance the object detection performance in various illumination conditions. The color information is incorporated into the template matched area and the features of the template are used to robustly calculate correlation coefficients. And the objects are recognized using multi-template matching approach. Finally, the water basin experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed techniques using an underwater robot platform yShark made by KORDI.