Active Bathymetric SLAM for autonomous underwater exploration

Abstract

Bathymetric simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods have shown their potential in deep-sea navigation and mapping for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). However, Bathymetric SLAM may fail catastrophically in area with flat terrain, due to the invalid loop closures caused by fake terrain matching results. This paper proposed an active bathymetric SLAM method, which drives an AUV into the area with sizeable topographic relief for accurate loop detection actively. A terrain-complexity-related mutual information utility function is proposed to optimize the trading-off between exploration and revisiting tasks of a vehicle. A simulation system has been constructed using both the robot operating system (ROS) and unity3d software to verify our algorithm. The simulation experiments show that our method is more efficient than state-of-the-art algorithms.