AUVs as integrated, adaptive acoustic sensors for ocean exploration

Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) are rapidly being transitioned into operational systems for national defense, offshore exploration, and ocean science. AUVs provide excellent sensor platform control, allowing for, e.g., accurate acoustic mapping of seabeds not easily reached by conventional platforms, such as the deep ocean. However, the full potential of the robotic platforms is far from exhausted by such applications. Thus, for example, most seabed-mapping applications use imaging sonar technology, the data volume of which cannot be transmitted back to the operators in real time due to the severe bandwidth limitation of the acoustic communication. The sampling patterns are therefore in general being preprogramed and the data are being stored for postmission analysis. This procedure is therefore associated with indiscriminate distribution of the sampling throughout the area of interest, irrespective of whether features of interest are present or not. However, today’s computing technology allows for a significant amount of signal processing and analysis to be performed on the platforms, where the results may then be used for real-time adaptive sampling to optimally concentrate the sampling in area of interest, and compress the results to a few parameters which may be transmitted back to the operators. Such adaptive sensing concepts combining environmental acoustics, signal processing, and robotics are currently being developed for concurrent detection, localization, and classification of buried objects, with application to littoral mine countermeasures, deep ocean seabed characterization, and marine archeology. [Work supported by ONR and NATO Undersea Research Center.]