Multisensor data fusion approach for terrain aided navigation of autonomous underwater vehicles

Autonomous navigation of underwater vehicles is a ´holy grail´ of underwater robotics in many ways. For an AUV to continually estimate its pose (position and orientation) and operate within an unknown environment solely based on its onboard sensors is a very challenging problem. In this paper, commonly used AUV sensors such as Inertial Navigation System (INS), Forward Looking Sonar (FLS) and monocular CCD camera are considered. Paper also discusses a robust feature tracking technique from image sequences and thereby estimating the ego-motion. It also discusses about the trajectory recovery from the FLS and fusion of INS and FLS. Experimental results, conducted using the test-bed AUV ´NTU-UAV´, are presented to highlight the performance of the proposed navigation scheme