Abstract
Unmanned surface vehicle (USV) is an important application of unmanned systems, and these USVs provide safe and secure operation in hostile environments. But these USVs are highly reliant on their positioning system, such as global position system (GPS), and loss of positioning information from GPS can cause catastrophe. To overcome this positioning challenge for a USV under a GPS denial environment, we propose a real-time positioning algorithm based on radar and satellite images to determine the USV position. The algorithm takes coastline as a registration feature to implement an image registration between a horizontal viewing angle image from a radar and a vertical viewing angle image from a satellite. The contributions of this paper consist of two parts. First, a coastline feature extraction method based on edge gray features for both radar and satellite images is provided. Second, a high-efficiency image registration method, which takes the dimensionality reduction distance as an indicator, was proposed for the USV embedded system. The results from six typical application scenarios show that the maximum positioning error of the proposed algorithm is 28.02 m under the worst case. A continuous positioning experiment shows that the average error of the algorithm is 9.77 m, which indicates that the algorithm can meet the positioning requirements of a USV under GPS denial environment.
Highlights
Unmanned systems such as Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) rely on information from Global Position System (GPS) and this information is an important reference for the automated operations of these unmanned systems
Unmanned systems such as Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and USVs rely on information from GPS and this information is an important reference for the automated operations of these unmanned systems
Dimensionality Reduction Registration (DRR) algorithm, which can obtain the real-time position of a USV through image registration between a radar image and a satellite image, is proposed in this paper to solve the positioning
Summary
Unmanned systems such as Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and USVs rely on information from GPS and this information is an important reference for the automated operations of these unmanned systems. Images obtained by cameras are mainly used for obstacle detection at a close range [24]and for USV control in narrow inland waterways [25] by detecting the coastline [26] This method has the potential to replace sonar to achieve low-cost obstacle marking [27]。 Radar is a good supplementary positioning means for manned boats with higher measuring accuracy and its signals are less subjected to variable weather conditions. The gray values of the pixel points representing uniformly-spaced lines are low and the gray values of the points representing large land obstacles are high, while the gray values of the points representing small obstacles such as boats fall in between Based on this information, we can obtain the coastline position. To cover the entire range of USV’s mobile activity, we used multiple VRPs to extract the coastline of the region
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Published Version
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