AUV-enabled adaptive underwater surveying for optimal data collection

A new adaptive strategy for performing data collection with a sonar-equipped autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is proposed. The approach is general in the sense that it is applicable to a wide range of underwater tasks that rely on subsequent processing of side-looking sonar imagery. By intelligently allocating resources and immediately reacting to the data collected in-mission, the proposed approach simultaneously maximizes the information content in the data and decreases overall survey time. These improvements are achieved by adapting the AUV route to prevent portions of the mission area from being either characterized by poor image quality or obscured by shadows caused by sand ripples. The peak correlation of consecutive sonar returns is used as a measure for image quality. To detect the presence of and estimate the orientation of sand ripples, a new innovative algorithm is developed. The components of the overall data-driven path-planning algorithm are purposely constructed to permit fast real-time execution with only minimal AUV onboard processing capabilities. Experimental results based on real sonar data collected at sea are used to demonstrate the promise of the proposed approach.