Range sonar array based SLAM for P-SURO AUV in a partially known environment

In this paper, we present a range sonar array based SLAM method for P-SURO AUV which is a test-bed for developing various underwater technologies. The vehicle´s operating environment is a 12(L)x8(W)x6(D)m dimensional cuboid basin and its wall information is assumed to be known in priori. With this information, we propose an EKF (Extended Kalman Filter) SLAM method for the vehicle´s operation in the basin. For range sonar, its measurement, in this paper, is modeled as a Gaussian distribution where the standard deviation is a function of sonar attack angle. Experimental studies are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed SLAM method.