Underwater Dense Mapping with the First Compact 3D Sonar
In the past decade, the adoption of compact 3D range sensors, such as LiDARs, has driven the developments of robust state-estimation pipelines, making them a standard sensor for aerial, ground, and space autonomy. Unfortunately, poor propagation of electromagnetic waves underwater, has limited the visibility-independent sensing options of underwater state-estimation to acoustic range sensors, which provide 2D information including, at-best, spatially ambiguous information. This paper, to the best of our knowledge, is the first study examining the performance, capacity, and opportunities arising from the recent introduction of the first compact 3D sonar. Towards that purpose, we introduce calibration procedures for extracting the extrinsics between the 3D sonar and a camera and we provide a study on acoustic response in different surfaces and materials. Moreover, we provide novel mapping and SLAM pipelines tested in deployments in underwater cave systems and other geometrically and acoustically challenging underwater environments. Our assessment showcases the unique capacity of 3D sonars to capture consistent spatial information allowing for detailed reconstructions and localization in datasets expanding to hundreds of meters. At the same time it highlights remaining challenges related to acoustic propagation, as found also in other acoustic sensors. Datasets collected for our evaluations would be released and shared with the community to enable further research advancements.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
VISO: Robust Underwater Visual-Inertial-Sonar SLAM with Photometric Rendering for Dense 3D Reconstruction
Visual challenges in underwater environments significantly hinder the accuracy of vision-based localisation and the high-fidelity dense reconstruction. In this paper, we propose VISO, a robust underwater SLAM system that…
3D ReconstructionSHRUMS: Sensor Hallucination for Real-time Underwater Motion Planning with a Compact 3D Sonar
Autonomous navigation in 3D is a fundamental problem for autonomy. Despite major advancements in terrestrial and aerial settings due to improved range sensors including LiDAR, compact sensors with similar capabilities fo…
Motion PlanningForward-Looking Sonar Patch Matching: Modern CNNs, Ensembling, and Uncertainty
Application of underwater robots are on the rise, most of them are dependent on sonar for underwater vision, but the lack of strong perception capabilities limits them in this task. An important issue in sonar perception…
Change DetectionPatch MatchingA Sonar-Visual Dataset for Cross-Modal Underwater Robot Perception
Underwater robots typically use both cameras and sonar for perception to leverage the rich semantic details of vision and the robust range measurements of acoustics. However, learning to map between these modalities via …
CAVE-NAV: VLM-Based Autonomous 3D Navigation in Underwater Cave Environments
Autonomous navigation in underwater cave environments is essential for search-and-rescue operations, scientific exploration, and emergency egress. Traditional navigation systems commonly depend on dense visual features f…