Development of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle and Performance Evaluation of Autonomous Navigation Technologies

Abstract

The use of autonomous marine robots has been rapidly increasing in the development of marine environments. This paper presents the development of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) and validation of autonomous navigation technologies. The ASV was developed as a testbed to validate fundamental navigation technologies for autonomous marine robots including both surface and underwater vehicles. The ASV was developed on a catamaran by integrating various sensors and power and electrical propulsion systems, navigation and control systems, and communication devices. As fundamental navigation technologies for ASV, waypoint tracking and obstacle avoidance are developed and tested. Further, using the ASV as a testbed to validate underwater navigation technologies, two types of underwater localization methods were developed. First, an acoustic-based navigation was developed by using acoustic sources as landmarks in underwater environment. The proposed acoustic-based navigation localized both vehicle and source by Kalman filter-based SLAM. Second, terrain-based localization as geophysics-based navigation was developed using a particle filter. Effective resampling can be achieved by using a measurement of terrain roughness. Both acoustic and terrain-based underwater navigation methods are implemented with the developed ASV, and the performance of the navigation methods are evaluated by comparing the estimated localization results to the ground truth acquired by GPS. Several field tests conducted in inland water environments demonstrate the performance of the developed vehicle and navigation algorithms.