We present the results of experiments performed using a small autonomous underwater vehicle to determine the location of an isobath within a bounded area. The primary contribution of this work is to implement and integrate several recent developments real-time planning for environmental mapping, and to demonstrate their utility in a challenging practical example. We model the bathymetry within the operational area using a Gaussian process and propose a reward function that represents the task of mapping a desired isobath. As is common in applications where plans must be continually updated based on real-time sensor measurements, we adopt a receding horizon framework where the vehicle continually computes near-optimal paths. The sequence of paths does not, in general, inherit the optimality properties of each individual path. Our real-time planning implementation incorporates recent results that lead to performance guarantees for receding-horizon planning.
@article{arxiv.2210.02524,
title = {Experiments in Underwater Feature Tracking with Performance Guarantees Using a Small AUV},
author = {Benjamin Biggs and Hans He and James McMahon and Daniel J. Stilwell},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.02524},
year = {2022}
}