Novel Directions for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Navigation in Confined Spaces

This position paper presents initial thoughts on how some techniques from general robotics can help for autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) navigation in confined spaces by exploiting in particular the spatial borders and considering information that is not available in open waters. There are natural confined spaces, e.g. caves, as well as artificial ones, e.g. tripods of off-shore wind turbines or underwater oil-and-gas facilities, which make this application interesting. We argue that the common AUV perceptual system with forward looking camera and/or sonar has deficits for measuring structures in the immediate surrounding of the AUV. This surrounding, however, is particularly important in confined spaces where the AUV cannot be seen as a “point in space” but its physical extension needs to be considered. Distant environment features that are observed in the remote sensors can be mapped, but later, when the AUV comes closer and the remote sensors cannot observe them anymore, they might not be directly usable for localization using these sensors. However, we still see the opportunity to make use of them and, moreover, to generate new features by other means. How this can be achieved is the central idea we want to convey here.