Study on Seabed Mapping using Two Sonar Devices for AUV Application

복수의 수중 소나를 활용한 수중 로봇의 3차원 지형 맵핑에 관한 연구

This study addresses a method for 3D reconstruction using acoustic data with heterogeneous sonar devices: Forward-Looking Multibeam Sonar (FLMS) and Profiling Sonar (PS). The challenges in sonar image processing are perceptual ambiguity, the loss of elevation information, and low signal to noise ratio, which are caused by the ranging and intensity-based image generation mechanism of sonars. The conventional approaches utilize additional constraints such as Lambertian reflection and redundant data at various positions, but they are vulnerable to environmental conditions. Our approach is to use two sonars that have a complementary data type. Typically, the sonars provide reliable information in the horizontal but, the loss of elevation information degrades the quality of data in the vertical. To overcome the characteristic of sonar devices, we adopt the crossed installation in such a way that the PS is laid down on its side and mounted on the top of FLMS. From the installation, FLMS scans horizontal information and PS obtains a vertical profile of the front area of AUV. For the fusion of the two sonar data, we propose the probabilistic approach. A likelihood map using geometric constraints between two sonar devices is built and a monte-carlo experiment using a derived model is conducted to extract 3D points. To verify the proposed method, we conducted a simulation and field test. As a result, a consistent seabed map was obtained. This method can be utilized for 3D seabed mapping with an AUV.