Related papers: SHRUMS: Sensor Hallucination for Real-time Underwa…

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…

Deep-sea exploration poses significant challenges, including disorientation, communication loss, and navigational failures in dynamic underwater environments. This paper presents an Autonomous Underwater Cognitive System (AUCS) that…

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) demand robust spatial perception capabilities, including Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), to support both remote and autonomous tasks. Vision-based…

This paper presents InsSo3D, an accurate and efficient method for large-scale 3D Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) using a 3D Sonar and an Inertial Navigation System (INS). Unlike traditional sonar, which produces 2D images…

3D situational awareness is critical for any autonomous system. However, when operating underwater, environmental conditions often dictate the use of acoustic sensors. These acoustic sensors are plagued by high noise and a lack of 3D…

Navigating spatially varied and dynamic environments is one of the key tasks for autonomous agents. In this paper we present a novel method of navigating a mobile platform with one or multiple 3D-sonar sensors. Moving a mobile platform and…

In this study, we present a novel simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system, VIMS, designed for underwater navigation. Conventional visual-inertial state estimators encounter significant practical challenges in perceptually…

Existing underwater SLAM systems are difficult to work effectively in texture-sparse and geometrically degraded underwater environments, resulting in intermittent tracking and sparse mapping. Therefore, we present Water-DSLAM, a novel…

Robust autonomous navigation in environments with limited visibility remains a critical challenge in robotics. We present a novel approach that leverages Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) sensing using single-photon LiDAR to improve visibility and…

The recent adoption of the Robot Operating System (ROS) as a software standard in robotics has contributed to novel solutions for several problems on the area. One such problem is known as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) with…

Underwater navigation presents several challenges, including unstructured unknown environments, lack of reliable localization systems (e.g., GPS), and poor visibility. Furthermore, good-quality obstacle detection sensors for underwater…

Critical maritime infrastructure increasingly demands situational awareness both above and below the surface, yet existing ''seabed-to-sky'' mapping pipelines either rely on GNSS (vulnerable to shadowing/spoofing) or expensive bathymetric…

Side-scan sonar (SSS) is a lightweight acoustic sensor that is frequently deployed on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to provide high-resolution seafloor images. However, using side-scan images to perform simultaneous localization and…

Navigating autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in unknown environments is significantly challenging due to poor visibility, weak signal transmission, and dynamic water currents. These factors pose challenges in accurate global…

Localization and mapping are core perceptual capabilities for underwater robots. Stereo cameras provide a low-cost means of directly estimating metric depth to support these tasks. However, despite recent advances in stereo depth estimation…

Among underwater perceptual sensors, imaging sonar has been highlighted for its perceptual robustness underwater. The major challenge of imaging sonar, however, arises from the difficulty in defining visual features despite limited…

This paper presents a novel tightly-coupled keyframe-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system with loop-closing and relocalization capabilities targeted for the underwater domain. Our previous work, SVIn, augmented the…

Although fully autonomous mapping methods are becoming more and more common and reliable, still the human operator is regularly employed in many 3D surveying missions. In a number of underwater applications, divers or pilots of remotely…

Accurate 3D volumetric mapping is critical for autonomous underwater vehicles operating in obstacle-rich environments. Vision-based perception provides high-resolution data but fails in turbid conditions, while sonar is robust to lighting…

Visual monitoring operations underwater require both observing the objects of interest in close-proximity, and tracking the few feature-rich areas necessary for state estimation.This paper introduces the first navigation framework, called…